Propolis Tincture & Salve

Don't worry folks, this entry has a mercifully low text to picture ratio!

Pretty much everyone and his dog knows bees make honey, a lot of people are also aware they make wax and a smaller number of people know bees make bees, but there's a couple of other things they make too. One of them is Propolis.

Properwhat now? Propolis is a natural resinous substance rich in antioxidants gathered by honey bees. It's made from tree sap and resin and has very powerful anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties and has been used in folk medicine for centuries. It's believed to be a natural treatment for a huge number of health problems and conditions including acne, bacterial infections, burns, canker sores, colds, cold sores, diabetes, giardiasis, herpes, inflammation, influenza, peptic ulcers, hay fever and to stimulate the immune system and prevent tooth decay. Seriously? Yup, apparently so. Whilst modern medicine is still evaluating it for various applications it's already seeing use in dentistry. Hippocrates recommended it for sores and ulcers, it also got a mention in Pliny’s Natural History (about 78 AD), Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica (sometime between 50 and 70 AD) and John Gerard’s Generall Historie of Plantes (1597).

There's a few different products you can make with propolis and I decided to go for a tincture. You can sell the tincture as it is or use it as a component for other things. Actually you can sell propolis as a powder or  in edible capsules or formed into tablets but I didn't fancy that. After all it's likely to be contaminated with a few solids like bits of hive and bee that people don't hugely want to be ingesting so I figured dissolved and filtered ina tincture was the way to go.

Propolis is really sticky stuff which would make it hard to work with but if you freeze it it becomes brittle. I kept in the freezer for a few weeks before using a coffee grinder to grind it up into a fine powder. I did that because I wanted to increase it's surface area so it would dissolve more readily in my solvent. There's a few things you can dissolve propolis in but I needed something safe for people to take internally and put on their skin, and also something that wouldn't require me to get involved with the legalese of high proof alcohol -which is pretty pricey stuff anyway. I opted for British Pharmacopoeia grade Propylene Glycol which is considered food safe. Propylene has a few different uses in food and other areas such as anti freeze. I got mine from an online veterinary supply shop -apparently it's used as a medication for farm animals.

5 litres of Propylene Glycol BP

The glycol/propolis suspension was then put in my airing cupboard above the hot water cylinder for a few weeks. It's warm enough in there to help the propolis dissolve but not hot enough to be detrimental to the propolis. To stop it settling too much I gave it a shake a couple of times a day to mix up.

After a few weeks I filtered the now dark mixture through a coffee filter, hellishly slow process that, to get my tincture. A nice uniform dark brown liquid which to me still tastes like Jägermeister but less sweet. 

Magic Bee Medicine!
I probably can't legally call it that :(

The tincture is to be sold in small bottles with dropper lids. I had two sizes of bottle which held 17ml or 20ml. The easiest way to do that was to use a syringe to measure it out. This stuff is usually used with a few drops dissolved in water or directly into the mouth if the taste doesn't bother you too much.

We don't want spillage.

With the bottles filled it was time to come up with some labels. I decided to use the bee currently in the top right corner of this blog. I drew it last year and I'm getting a lot of mileage from it. Whilst it's not really a food I decided to label it in line with food regulations with contents, metric weight , ingredients list, contact address and country of origin, best by date and a batch number on two labels. I also thought that the label would look a little nicer and more olde worlde with the corners trimmed instead of square. I think it looks pretty neat but it made peeling the labels off the backing paper a pig of a job. I'd made eighty odd bottles and with two labels on each it seemed to take an age. Looks good though :)

Final product.

So that was tincture made, the other product I wanted to make was a salve which can be applied to the skin for various conditions cuts and grazes. Once you have the propolis tincture it's actually fairly easy to make the salve. Its just added to molten petroleum jelly and mixed till it sets. I wanted to make a fair amount of salve so I was going to need a lot of petroleum jelly. Took me a while to locate but it turns out horsey people use petroleum jelly by the bucketful. I've no idea what they do with it but I'm guessing those equestrian types must have some fairly crazy parties!

I thought we'd try something different tonight dear.

Molten Petroleum Jelly

Molten Petroleum Jelly with Propolis Tincture
Nice colour.

Once the petroleum jelly was melted I let it cool a little then added the propolis tincture. The tincture sank to the bottom so I had to stir it as it continued to cool to make sure it was evenly mixed throughout. Then I transfered it to a glass measuring jug and poured it into plastic tubs which were on a scale so I could measure the weight of salve. I later found it was easier to melt the petroleum jelly in the jug in the oven then mix the tincture in it too. The tubs I had held 50g of the salve so popping a tub on the scale and hitting the zero button I decanted 50g of the stuff into each, actually I went just over but that's okay it's short measures people don't like.

Ooops went over.

First batch of Propolis Salve

Next job was to label the tubs up. I decided to label it similarly to the tincture, same font, same picture and so on but with square corners. After all they're white labels on white plastic tubs.

My bees all look the same

I made fifty two tubs of propolis salve and just for the sake of variety made thirty tubs of Propolis and Tea Tree Salve by adding some Tea Tree Essential Oil to the mix.

Another finished product.

I also had a few tins of polish left too but I wasn't keen on my old bee picture in the label so I made up some small stickers of the newer picture and stuck them over the old one. I think it looks a lot better and it gives my different products a uniform look, a brand if you will.

Beeswax Polish -now with new improved label!

I never envisioned I'd be making skin and healthcare products but beekeeping certainly takes you down some unexpected paths. All that filtering, measuring, mixing, melting and cooling things was a little Breaking Bad. Well now I have a product I just need to market it.