Humans have been risking life and limb to steal honey away from bees for hundreds of years. For many, the sweet prize is worth the risk of a painful sting, and fortunately for most modern people, the danger is assumed by people who know what they are doing.

While almost everyone has tried honey at some point, there is one type of honey that is much less common and believed by many to have some incredible benefits: royal honey.

Royal honey is actually a combination of regular honey that is mixed with royal jelly.

So, what is royal jelly?

Royal jelly is also produced by bees. It is a thick white substance that is secreted by specialized glands in the worker bees. This highly nutritious food is fed to the bee larvae that are going to become queen throughout their larvae stage. For normal drone bees and worker bees, it is only fed to them for the first three days of their life.

Royal jelly has key ingredients like vitamin BV6, pantothenic acid, and more. It is perfect for providing the future queen of the colony with everything she needs to be strong and healthy enough to produce millions of eggs, giving the bee colony its best chance at survival.

While it is clear that royal jelly is very good for bees, some companies have been harvesting it and selling it to people as a health supplement (mixed with regular honey because so little of it is produced).

It is marketed as being able to help rejuvenate the skin, improve overall health, and even function as an aphrodisiac.

While these claims are backed by some research, they haven’t been fully tested. Plus, to get the desired effect people would have to eat quite a bit of it.

There was a 2022 study that showed that royal jelly does potentially enhance the fertility of mammals. When applied, there was an improved pregnancy rate as well as an increased success rate of in-vitro fertilization for rodents and some farm animals.

In humans, there is some evidence that royal jelly can boost male fertility as well.

Of course, increased fertility does not necessarily mean it also functions as an aphrodisiac.

The bottom line with royal jelly is that while it almost certainly isn’t bad for you in its pure form, most of the products out there sold as royal honey are so diluted that there will likely be no benefits.