The Rats Are Going To Love This Announcement, And We Will Too!

By Grace Bennett, Eliza Grimm, and Natalie Moore

While most people recognize that a bee’s stinger is an important defense mechanism for the bee, they don’t realize that the venom in a bee sting could be beneficial to humans in a medical setting due to its anti-inflammatory properties. While the general opinion of bees has grown increasingly positive in recent years, many people still fear getting stung by them. On the flip side, bee venom has been used as a medicinal tool throughout history, with the first evidence of it dating back to ancient Greece and Egypt. Characterized by swelling and tenderness in joints, Arthritis is a chronic illness that can cause acute joint pain and affects people across the world. Gouty arthritis is an even more severe form of arthritis in which there is sudden severe swelling around the joints due to a build up in uric acid, which crystallizes around the joints and causes the breakdown of cartilage.

In 2021, a team of researchers from Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea tested bee venom’s ability to treat gout in rats to see if bee venom could be a viable alternative to synthetic anti-inflammatory drugs such as NSAIDs (ibuprofen, aspirin, etc.) and colchicine (an alternative treatment for gout in people unable to tolerate NSAIDs). Gout is a type of arthritis that causes redness, swelling, pain, and tenderness in one or more joints. While synthetic drugs treat inflammation from gout effectively, there are many negative side-effects associated with them which is why researchers want to find alternatives.

[1] Figure 1: shows the difference in lab rats ankles dependent upon injection with bee venom, colchicine, or nothing but MSU crystals

In their experiment, the researchers injected the ankles of adult male rats with MSU crystals to cause gout to develop. One group of rats were also injected with bee venom, another group was injected with colchicine, and the last group only received theMSU injection. They made observations hourly within the 24 hour period after the injections. First, they measured the circumference of the rats’ gouty ankles, and then they performed a von Frey test to measure the rats’ pain responses. In a von Frey test, researchers use tiny filaments to poke the hindpaws of rats and observe their responses to determine how much pain they are experiencing. When a rat shows no pain response, the researchers move on to a slightly thicker filament. The researchers then record the size of the filament that elicits a response.

When the researchers measured the rats’ ankles, they found that bee venom and colchicine treated rats showed a similar response. While the rats who were only injected with the MSU crystals continued to show a significant increase in swollenness after the first three hours, the swollenness of the bee venom and colchicine treated rats leveled off a little and started to decrease slightly after the six hour mark as shown in Figure 1.

[2] Figure 2: This graph shows the relationship between time after injection and the size of von Frey filaments that elicited a response from the rats.

The von Frey test also showed that bee venom was effective at treating the gout. The untreated rats had the most pain around the three hour mark, and after that it improved slightly before finally leveling off at the six hour mark. The colchicine treated rats showed a slight increase in pain at the three hour mark, had the most pain around the six hour mark, and went back to normal by the 24 hour mark. The entire time, their pain was significantly less than that of the untreated rats. Finally, the bee venom treated rats saw no increase in pain until the six hour mark, and went back to normal after the eight hour mark. The whole time, they had less pain than the colchicine treated rats, as seen in Figure 2.

These observations show that bee venom proved to be similarly effective to (or even more effective than) colchicine when it comes to treating inflammation from gout in rats. While this doesn’t prove that bee venom would be a viable treatment option for gout in humans, it does show promise. This can prove as an important scientific breakthrough for medical science and the eventual treatment of arthritis in humans. In the future, we may see more researchers conducting similar experiments in other mammals and eventually humans. In addition to the human benefit, the utilization of bee venom is beneficial to the bees themselves as it can encourage people to think about the many benefits provided by bees and thus further preservation of bee species worldwide. As proven by the Kyung Hee University researchers, this potential for partnership between bees and humans is a mutually beneficial relationship that can better the future of both man and insect.



Further Reading

Mayo Clinic . (2021). Arthritis - Symptoms and causes. Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/arthritis/symptoms-causes/syc-20350772

Goo, B., Lee, J., Park, C., Yune, T., & Park, Y. (2021). Bee venom alleviated edema and pain in monosodium urate crystals-induced gouty arthritis in rat by inhibiting inflammation. Toxins, 13(9), 661. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6651/13/9/661



Media Credits

[1] and [2] Figures from Goo et al. (2021) in Toxins CC BY 4.0 DEED.