Sweet deal: native bee can make lucrative and healthy sugar

Australian stingless bees can use regular table sugar to produce healthy and low GI equivalent.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have found that a rare, low GI sugar, trehalulose, is produced specifically in the gut of stingless honeybees and that it can be made with the use of sucrose — simple table sugar. The origins of trehalulose in honey were previously a mystery, with the possibility of its source being from the local flora, but its production in the gut of Australian stingless bees makes widespread production a tempting possibility.

While European honey bees produce more honey than their stingless tropical and subtropical counterparts, the honey of the latter can fetch a high price and is well regarded by Indigenous people for its perceived medicinal properties. Researchers hypothesised that more production of trehalulose could be boosted, and found that this was possible by feeding a species of Australian stingless honeybees a syrup made from table sugar. However, like humans, it is best for bees not to subsist on a diet of such sugar so researchers are looking for local flora with a high proportion of sucrose in their nectar to increase trehalulose production naturally.

The research study is published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (DOI 10.1021/acs.jafc.1c02859).

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