Can Royal Jelly Be Used As a Plant Food?

Royal Jelly

• Royal Jelly is a thick substance produced by bees. It is produced from plant pollen exclusively for the sake of feeding the queen bee. The queen bee becomes larger and capable of producing thousands of offspring solely because of that substance. The queen eats the jelly as her only food source.

Plants and Crops

• The standard academic work in the field is “Toxic Substances in Crop Plants,” by J. P. Felix D'Mello and C. M. Duffus. They do not treat royal jelly as such, but they do deal with some of its ingredients. The problem might be that these ingredients -- the amino acids, more specifically -- are treated in isolation and not part of the organic whole of the jelly. At the very least, some of these ideas might give a tentative answer to the problem.

Amino Acids

• In general, D'Mello and Duffus do not like the use of amino acids that royal jelly has in abundance, such as cysteine and lysine. They are, in and of themselves, toxic substances to most crops and plants. However, in tiny doses, they seem to have a positive effect on crops. While the authors do not speculate on the nature of the dose, if you are convinced that royal jelly can help your plants, these authors strongly suggest that it be used in very small amounts.

Acids

• In general, small amounts of the acids lysine and cysteine, as well as other acids such as aspartic, have positive effects on crops and plants. Basically, these acids protect plants against disease and rapid aging. You can use them in small amounts to improve how the plant synthesizes its other food sources, making the actual use of nutrition more efficient. Building up the plant's natural “immune system” seems to be the main benefit of tiny amounts of these amino acids found in royal jelly.

Gelatin

• Another significant part of the jelly is, naturally enough, gelatin. Gelatin, when synthesized by plants in water, provides the all-important nitrates the plant desperately needs. Nitrates are the single most essential aspect of any plant food and all plant life. Therefore, since royal jelly contains gelatin in fairly large amounts, it, when dissolved in water, will provide your plants with a nitrate boost that can help it grow. However, as always, the amount of jelly you use at any given time should be tiny.