TO BE FOR ‘NOT TO BEE’: Israeli startup saves bees, makes its own honey
Only seven bees out of 20,000 types of bees make honey. And they’re dying because we’re abusing them. Bee-io Honey's researchers created its own solution to combat the global honey problem, without the need for bees.
SIMONA SHEMER: “Did you know the world is running out of honey?” asks vlogger Nusseir Yassin — also known as Nas Daily — in one of his latest one-minute viral video clips on Instagram, “Only seven bees out of 20,000 types of bees make honey. And they’re dying because we’re abusing them.”
He’s not wrong. “We as humans want to use those seven species to pollinate but also to get the honey that they’re making and sell it because it’s so expensive. So we choose these seven over and over again from the other 20,000 different species. What happened — and we see it now in articles in science magazines and even in Israel — that we are pushing them into extinction,” Ofir Dvash, CEO and co-founder of Bee-io Honey, tells NoCamels. Pushing these species helps push other species into extinction, and “the other species are very important to the balance of our environment,” he adds.
The clip, which earned Nas, known for his videos of people and companies making a difference, a whopping 1.4 million views, calls to attention Dvash and his team at Israeli startup Bee-io Honey. The company is using Israeli-developed research and tech to create its own solution to combat the global honey problem — without the need for bees…
Founded in 2021, the Bee-io Honey team has been developing cultured honey in a lab in Rehovot Science Park lab using natural nectar from plants and bee protein. Since May, the company has been traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange under the symbol BHNY at an $11 million market cap after merging with shell company Whitestone group.
Bee-io already has six patents filed in the United States regarding the different processes and technologies that they are developing in honey and the firm announced this month that two of its international patents filed received positive criticism from the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty), the international patent system, and are accelerated to the national stage in the United States.
“This is the last stage before we hopefully get an approval patent,” says Dvash. “So regarding cultivated honey, we will be the first company ever in the world that will have two patents regarding cultivated honey and our technology.” The approval, translated into English, reads that Bee-io was successful in producing cultured royal jelly protein in an accurate fermentation process using a bioreactor as a preliminary stage or mass production and also successfully completed an experiment proving that the protein has antibacterial properties…
“We are able to choose the different plants and flowers that we are making our honey from and we are able to make honey without any chemicals, antibiotics, and botulism,” says Dvash. (Botulism is a rare and potentially fatal illness caused by a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Honey is a known dietary reservoir of C. botulinum spores and has been linked to infant botulism.) “Our honey has all the good qualities, and we take out the bad qualities that are now very much available in natural honey that we buy in the supermarkets.”
Dvash tells NoCamels that the company aims to commercialize its cultured honey as soon as possible and that they are now working on regulation. “Regarding the US markets, we hope that in the next year or so we can open a facility and production facility in the United States,” he says. We want to commercialize them as soon as possible. SOURCE…
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