Question about bee products

[limyw]

Is there any difference in quality for royal jelly/propolis that produced from hives that fed with sugar syrup and natural nectar source? I knew there are many beekeepers produce royal jelly and propolis through feeding.

[Michael Bush]

Jay Smith (Queen Rearing Simplified and Better Queens) certainly thought so on the royal jelly.  He would never try to rear good quality queens on sugar syrup.  There is no syrup in the propolis so it would be irrelevant , and they usually won't be mixing syrup with the pollen, they will be using the nectar in that flower for that.

How much difference is there really?  Probably not much since most of the nutrients in royal jelly come from the pollen.  Now pollen substitutes would change that radically...

[limyw]

So this means royal jelly produced from sugar syrup but not from pollen substitues would be ok?

[Michael Bush]

>So this means royal jelly produced from sugar syrup but not from pollen substitues would be ok?

I know of no research on the subject, but from my experience I'd say as long as the royal jelly was made from real pollen the differences because of honey vs sugar, would be negligible.

The differences because of pollen vs pollen substitute, on the other hand, have been researched thoroughly and there is NO doubt that real pollen is significantly better than substitute.