Obtaining Methods

The word "apitoxin " (bee venom) comes from the Greek: APIS=bee TOXICOM=poison (venom).
The methods to obtain the bee venom have developed greatly in the last years.

At the beginning the animal was sacrificed to obtain its venom. It was necessary to sacrifice between 8000 and 9000 bees to obtain one gram of bee venom. Besides being a bloody and contradictory method, it was extremely difficult.

Many methods were devised trying to obtain the product without sacrifying the animal. One of these methods is to place an important number of bees in a square glass container covered with a gauze with ether, which anesthetizes the bees. Before the bees fall anesthetized, they sting the walls of the container. These bees are then returned to the beehive and the glass of the jar is scraped off to obtain the product. It is quite a complicated method, and only a little quantity of bee venom is obtained every time. There are some other systems that have developed devised the form of obtaining apitoxin from bees of a certain age, believing that in this way a more homogeneous product is obtained. All these methods, have their historical value, but from the industrial point of view, where important quantities of bee venom are needed, they lack a practical value.

Nowadays it is widespread that bee venom is obtained by means of stimulating the bee by an electrical current that incite them to sting, putting a drop of poison in a place to be extracted.

Although the electronic machine should not have many varieties, as for the type and current intensity, there is an infinite variety in the design of the traps (place where the bee drops the venom).

The gathering of poison consists of two parts 1) field work or its harvest and 2) extraction. As for the harvest work, two elements are needed: a stimulator and a certain number of traps (one stimulator can usually serve from 20 to 40 traps).

The stimulator should have a very precise construction, reading elements and appropriate controls. We have to think that we are working with live elements that are in different states of spirit, according to the day and the time of the year, we cannot always manage with the same stimulus. The stimulators should have measurements for the amperage and the voltage, and they should have controls to modify the voltage, the intensity, the frequency and the time of stimulation. All these values should be adjusted every working day according to the state of the beehives, and very often during the same crop.

As for the traps, there are a lot of designs, according to the producer’s preferences. Today we use a superior fixed trap, with 3 glasses,constantly connected to the general electric installation, below the roof, there is a sliding door which isolates the trap from the rest of the beehive. It is a very convenient trap that uses the bees that are inside the beehive and a very practical one. The inconvenience is in its cost, because we need a trap per beehive, but a lot of time is saved in the crop. With this system we obtain approximately 150 mg by beehive each crop.

After about 30 minutes of stimulation, we close all the sliding doors, which gives us a great ease for handling the beehive, and we extract the glass with the crystallized venom. We place it in wooden boxes, well protected from the sun and humidity, and we take them to the extraction place. There should not be more than 8 hours between the crop and the extraction. The operator in the extraction place should be appropriately protected with a powder mask, adequate glasses, ,smock, and gloves, or if not, the extraction should be preferably made in a hermetic glass bell, since the bee venom, managed in those quantities can be extremely dangerous. The glasses are scraped off, and its containment is weighed and poured in amber glass bottles, inside refrigerators. The product in such condition can have a useful life of about 5 years.