Honey is one of the foods most of us grew up with. We’ve drizzled it on toast or pancakes, mixed it into tea, or poured a spoonful of it onto yogurt and cereal. “While honey feels like an ordinary substance, nothing about it is commonplace. Honey is one of Mother Nature’s most complex natural foods that we humans consume throughout the globe. In fact, honey is made without factories, machines, or human hands. Humans are merely harvesters of the honey,” says Andrea Geresdi, a beekeeper in the Cape Coral area who traveled to Costa Rica and China, where bee medicine is used in hospitals, to learn about bees and bee venom therapy, also known as apitherapy.

Apitherapy

According to PubMed, apitherapy is an alternate therapy that relies on the usage of honeybee products, most importantly bee venom, for the treatment of many human diseases. The venom can be introduced into the human body by manual injection or by direct bee stings. Bee venom contains several active molecules, such as peptides and enzymes, that have advantageous potential in treating inflammation and central nervous system diseases.

It All Depends on Bees and Flowers

Every drop of honey begins with a flower and ends with a bee colony working together in a way that’s not changed for millennia. Geresdi emphasizes that bees continue to be responsible for pollinating 75%-80% of all plants worldwide, including about 75% of all fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown for human consumption.

Dwindling Population of Bees

Quite alarmingly, honeybee populations are dwindling throughout the world due to environmental pollutants, diminishing habitat, diseases, parasites, and the effects of rising summer temperatures that are linked to climate change, as documented by research done for the international arm of the Japanese public broadcaster, NHK World-Japan. “Collectively, we must reach some sort of awareness level about this problem. People might love their beautiful green lawns, but we’re paying a heavy-duty price for that because it’s killing the bees,” says Geresdi, who notes that bees and their honey have played a part in human history for thousands of years, long before science understood that honey resists spoilage and kills bacteria.

A World Without Honeybees (Apis mellifera)

In 2022, the National Resources Defense Council reported, “If honeybees disappeared for good, our diets would suffer tremendously. The variety of foods available would diminish, and the cost of certain products would surge. The California Almond Board, for example, has been campaigning to save bees for years. Without bees and their ilk, almonds wouldn’t exist. We’d still have coffee without bees, but it would become expensive and rare. The coffee flower is only open for pollination for three or four days. If no insect happens by in that short window, the plant won’t be pollinated… The disappearance of honeybees, or even a substantial drop in their population, would make those foods scarce. Humanity would survive—but our dinners would get a lot less interesting.”

Florida is the Hub for Beekeepers

After her globetrotting education on bees concluded, Geresdi made it her life’s work to continue learning about them, protect the tiny-winged insects, spread the word about their possible extinction and how to prevent it, as well as figure out how to combine the use of her Diagnostic Body Scan device with apitherapy to help people with the alternative therapy. “This was not a stretch for me from what I did as the previous owner of the Salt Cave in Naples. The device was invented for the astronauts who returned from space with bone density problems. The device stimulates human brainwaves to align with the Earth’s electromagnetic frequency (7.83 Hz), known as the Schumann resonance. It is also similar to our heart rate.

“After learning that Florida is one of the beekeeping capitals, I signed up for a beekeeping school that was 10 minutes away from our home. They weren’t only close, but they also had monthly gatherings. One was on the same day that I did the Google search. I attended, and just as I found my seat, my name was called as the grand prize winner of a beehive,” explains Geresdi.

Geresdi’s journey with the bees moved to the fast lane a week later when she registered for a school in Europe that was led by a medical doctor. “When I completed that certification course, I registered for and completed two other international apitherapy courses to expand my knowledge about the beautiful gifts that bees provide for humans. Currently, I have five colonies, two of which I dedicate to Beehive Air Therapy and the three others for all apitherapy needs,” she says.

Andrea Geresdi sells her honey and bee-derived products every Saturday at the Downtown Cape Coral Farmer’s Market from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., located in Club Square, SW 47th Terrace and SE 10th Place, and each Sunday at the Pine Ridge Farmers Market, located at 3370 Pine Ridge Road N. in Naples.