Green Innovation and Synthesis of Honeybee Products-Mediated Nanoparticles: Potential Approaches and Wide Applications

Abstract

Bee products, abundant in bioactive ingredients, have been utilized in both traditional and contemporary medicine. Their antioxidant, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory properties make them valuable for food, preservation, and cosmetics applications. Honeybees are a vast reservoir of potentially beneficial products such as honey, bee pollen, bee bread, beeswax, bee venom, and royal jelly. These products are rich in metabolites vital to human health, including proteins, amino acids, peptides, enzymes, sugars, vitamins, polyphenols, flavonoids, and minerals. The advancement of nanotechnology has led to a continuous search for new natural sources that can facilitate the easy, low-cost, and eco-friendly synthesis of nanomaterials. Nanoparticles (NPs) are actively synthesized using honeybee products, which serve dual purposes in preventive and interceptive treatment strategies due to their richness in essential metabolites. This review aims to highlight the potential role of bee products in this line and their applications as catalysts and food preservatives and to point out their anticancer, antibacterial, antifungal, and antioxidant underlying impacts. The research used several online databases, namely Google Scholar, Science Direct, and Sci Finder. The overall findings suggest that these bee-derived substances exhibit remarkable properties, making them promising candidates for the economical and eco-friendly production of NPs.

Keywords: bee products; biological activities; catalytic application; food industries; nanoparticles.

Figure 6

(A) The overall diagrammatic preparation of CuNPs derived from Honey, and (B) illustrates the anti-cancer properties of the synthesized CuNPs (Figure used with permission) [114].

Figure 1

Flowchart of the systematic literature review strategy. n: Number of published papers.

Figure 2

Deciphering the role of bee product metabolites in eco-friendly nanoparticle synthesis.

Figure 3

Honey mediated nanoparticles and their possible application (figure used with permission) [31].

Figure 4

Diagrammatic illustration of the eco-friendly production of AgNPs using royal jelly (A), and the possible antibacterial action mechanism of AgNPs against both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria (B) (Figure used with permission) [97].

Figure 5

(A): Synthesis of AgNPs using Cupressus sempervirens pollen extract [55] and (B): ZnO synthesis using royal jelly (figure used with permission) [98].

Figure 7

Highlighting the diverse biological impacts of nanoparticles derived from honeybee products.