On the view of stingless bees’ non-honey foods

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in non-honey products of stingless bees due to their high medicinal and therapeutic properties. Therefore, meliponiculture opens the opportunity for propolis, bee bread, and bee pollen to enter the commercial market as their therapeutic values are comparable to the honey itself. Among others, propolis and bee bread are of great potential and market demand. They possess high nutritional values and medicinal properties including anticancer, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial. This mini-review is aimed to highlight the state-of-the-art of processing and extraction methods, applications, and nutritional values of several stingless bees’ non-honey foods. The current patterns and challenges are discussed to bring insight into future research directions in this field.

Keywords:

• Bee bread
• non-honey food
• medicinal
• nutritional
• propolis
• stingless bee
• therapeutic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is partly funded by UTM-ICONIC Grant No. 09G54.