Honeybees and bumblebees help to reduce allergies
Bumblebees, honeybees and their product honey can be used to reduce allergies. In sweet pepper greenhouses, honeybees or bumblebees reduce the amount of pollen which falls from the flowers, leading to fewer allergy problems among staff. Eating honey itself may also help to fight allergies. Researchers at Plant Research International are testing this theory.
Some sweet pepper growers or their employees are unlucky: over the course of the years, they become allergic to the sweet pepper pollen. What starts with a running nose, streaming eyes or an itch can even lead to an irreversible reduction in lung capacity.
Bumblebees have been used in greenhouses for some time to pollinate the crops. In sweet pepper cultivation, pollination is not needed because the plant is a self-pollinator, but using honeybees or bumblebees is nevertheless an option.
Our researchers tested whether honeybees or bumblebees can get rid of the pollen in greenhouses. This proved to be the case, with bumblebees being slightly more effective than honeybees. Ten colonies per hectare were enough to remove 80 percent of the pollen, which is sufficient to prevent pollen from falling while working on the plants. With these figures, employees in the greenhouse have far fewer problems with allergic reactions. Further research is still required to precisely describe the effects on health.
Honey
It is said that regionally produced honey may have an anti-allergenic effect. If this is true, the honey must necessarily contain small quantities of pollen from trees or grass which can cause allergic reactions, such as hazel, birch, grass, oak or poplar. Bees do not seek out these plants for nectar, but the pollen can be carried on the wind and end up in the honey by transfer from bee to bee in the hive. The research did indeed discover low quantities of this allergenic pollen in regionally-produced flower honeys which they had collected from all over the country. The question of whether this has an effect on allergies to that same pollen requires further study by allergists.
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