Kate Hinkens had been dealing with Lyme disease since she was seven years old. After years of misdiagnosis, relapse, and months of intravenous antibiotics that left her sleeping eighteen hours a day and unable to finish a sentence, she found her way to bee venom therapy - ordering bees online, standing in her bathroom with tweezers, and stinging herself until something shifted.
Kate is now a beekeeper and bee venom therapy practitioner who teaches people how to self-administer BVT for chronic illness. In this episode we get into the biochemistry of why bee venom can do things antibiotics can't, what a low-histamine diet looks like during treatment, the full medicine cabinet of the hive: honey, propolis, royal jelly, bee pollen, bee bread, the ethics of beekeeping, and what bees have to teach us about reciprocity with the natural world.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
01:28 Kate's Lyme disease history and years of misdiagnosis
03:17 Why Lyme is so hard to diagnose and treat
05:00 The antibiotic route and why it stopped working
08:25 Discovering bee venom therapy
10:00 The science: melittin, biofilms, and chronic Lyme
12:30 Apamin and the blood-brain barrier
14:00 Immune regulation and systemic inflammation
16:00 Diet and detox during BVT
19:00 Alpha-gal and the Lone Star tick
21:30 Andrew's own Lyme disease experience
23:00 Royal jelly, propolis, honey, bee pollen, and bee bread
32:00 The ethics of beekeeping and native bee populations
40:00 Does it matter what species of bee you use?
43:00 The honeybee's origins in North America
45:00 The ethics of using bees for BVT
49:00 Fun facts: how honey is actually made
54:00 How bees make decisions
57:00 The geometry of the honeycomb
59:00 The vibrational frequency of bees and healing
1:01:20 Kate's bee boxes and her BVT practice
1:02:41 How this deepened her connection to nature
1:05:07 Favorite food memory
Episode 8
