Kate Hinkens (00:00)
part of the reason that Lyme disease is such a complicated thing to both diagnose and to treat is because of how smart the Lyme bacteria is itself. And so the Lyme bacteria is this really brilliant bacteria that can take on a bunch of different forms. So every time it divides to replicate, it's able to change its genetic structure a little bit.

And then that makes it extremely hard to address with both natural treatments, but also with antibiotics and any of the other things that people develop to try to treat the Lyme bacteria. The other thing that makes it very hard to treat is that it can morph into different forms. So it has a cystic form, it has a spirochete form, it can burrow into any of the body's tissues. It's able to very easily go through the blood brain barrier. And so it very often manifests in neurological ways.

Andrew Valenti (00:23)
Wow.

Kate Hinkens (00:52)
one of these great imitator diseases that we see where most people end up getting misdiagnosed with something else before they eventually get diagnosed with Lyme, which was very much the case for me as well. So I first got sick when I was seven years old. I grew up in Minnesota and spent my summers at my grandparents cabin in Wisconsin. And there were ticks everywhere, of course. I don't remember having a specific tick bite.

Andrew Valenti (01:17)
Mm-hmm.

Kate Hinkens (01:22)
But there were always ticks around and at that point I Basically the way that it came on for me was extremely strong. So I my mom was picking me up one day from school. I collapsed on the ground and basically from that moment on I was Extremely extremely ill so for me it was severe joint pain Constant migraines I started to have to be carried or like put in a wheelchair

Andrew Valenti (01:25)
Mm-hmm.

Kate Hinkens (01:52)
chair to go anywhere. My parents would even have to carry me from my bed to the bathroom. ⁓ I was in such constant joint and nerve pain that I would be like screaming, my parents tell me, in pain. And so I spent about a year in and out of the Mayo Clinic and getting every test under the sun. They diagnosed me with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis initially. They thought it could be some rare form of blood cancer and they had me see

Andrew Valenti (02:05)
Hmm.

Kate Hinkens (02:22)
every specialist you could possibly imagine. ⁓ And finally, my parents were like, you can't keep running all these tests on this tiny child. And, at this point I was wasting away in a wheelchair. ⁓ And so the doctors were like, we don't know if she's going to live or not. ⁓ But my parents took me out of that and I ended up just kind of magically getting better. They had run a Lyme test at this point, because obviously growing up in

Minnesota,

you are exposed to ticks. The problem is, is that the standard Lyme tests that are run have a very high false negative rate, and the tests were not at that point nearly as advanced as they are now. And so very likely I got a false negative, and that was that. I mysteriously got better about a year later.

Andrew Valenti (03:02)
Right, right.

And that

Kate Hinkens (03:17)
and from then it was sort of one of those things where we're like, what a weird fluke. And I went on living my very normal, healthy, happy childhood. ⁓ When I was 15, then in high school, very similarly, I had this very abrupt onset and once again was sick for about a year. ⁓ And then once again got better. And it was just this weird, mysterious thing where we were trying all the different modalities, both

very Western and ⁓ very Eastern modalities. And it kind of seemed like nothing really worked.

but I just magically would get better. when then the most recent time that I got sick was a much slower onset and lasted for much longer. So when I was graduating college, I graduated in 2016 and kind of from that time, I slowly started to have these symptoms come on. And this time around, it was less obvious because it was much more gradual. And so I started to feel a lot of the neurological effects

where my memory started to go. I was having a ton of fogginess and issues like putting together sentences properly. I started to have the body pain and the joint pain and I finally got diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2019. So it was three years kind of after I had started getting sick at that point. And it was actually because a very close friend of mine had Lyme.

disease

when we lived together in college and she said, oh, this sounds like what I experienced. And so it wasn't even any of the...

doctors that I was seeing that urged me to get tested. So that just shows you how much it's not on so many doctors' radars. And so I got diagnosed with Lyme and ⁓ the naturopathic doctor I was seeing at that point put me on ⁓ a bunch of different herbal protocols, which I was attracted to because I was like, great, it's natural. I believe in the power of the plants to heal us. Great, let's do it.

that didn't work for me. I started seeing other top Lyme specialists, and I basically was told the only way to actually eradicate Lyme is by doing high dose intravenous antibiotics for an extended period of time. And so, yes. And mind you, like, I have been, I've been teaching yoga since I was 14. I, like, worked for an Ayurvedic medicine company. I am so...

Andrew Valenti (05:48)
Oof.

Kate Hinkens (06:01)
in love with all of the opportunities like that we have from the natural world, but when you are that sick, you're kind of willing to do anything. And I was like, okay, if the experts say this is the only way, this is the only way, that's okay. ⁓

Andrew Valenti (06:10)
Yeah.

Kate Hinkens (06:16)
And so I was going in four times a week to get intravenous antibiotics. I was taking a ton of experimental medications for Lyme as well. So there are some anti-malaria medications that people use. There are a lot of anti-parasitics. And so I was taking so many different medications and supplements on top of intravenous antibiotics, ozone therapy, and stem cells.

Andrew Valenti (06:42)
Wow.

Kate Hinkens (06:42)
and was doing this for

months. And as I was in this process, I just kept getting sicker. And so at my worst, I was asleep like 18 hours a day. ⁓ I...

couldn't walk more than like 10 or 15 feet at a time without needing to like sit down and rest because I was so dizzy and fatigued. I was unable to really complete a sentence. Like I would start talking and not remember how I was supposed to finish it. I would forget close friends names as I was looking at them and speaking to them. It was a really scary experience because I felt so just disconnected from.

everything that I knew and loved about who I was. it was, yeah. It was really scary. And you know, when you're in that state, you really... it's such an identity loss in a lot of ways, ⁓ because obviously the physical symptoms are scary, but I think the even scarier part was feeling like I'd lost my sense of self and...

Andrew Valenti (07:27)
Yeah, that's terrifying. Wow. Wow.

Kate Hinkens (07:50)
I lost my ability to use my brain, which I'd always really identified with and loved. I lost my ability to be social and have connection in my life. I lost my sort of motivation and will and excitement for anything in my life. And that deterioration, I think, was even scarier than any of the physical deterioration that was happening. And so I had heard about this thing called bee venom therapy.

And when you're that sick, you're in some weird corners of the internet ⁓ looking for answers ⁓ because, you know, so much of normal ⁓ medicine doesn't give you answers. And so you're just trying things and curious. I had heard about bee venom therapy. And when I first heard about it, I was like, I'm open minded, but not that open minded.

Andrew Valenti (08:25)
Yeah.

Kate Hinkens (08:43)
⁓ It sounded a little off the deep end even for me and I had always been open to things. And so I kind of put it on the back burner as I was doing all these antibiotics and very Western treatments. ⁓ And then the thing that actually ended up switching it for me where I explored bee venom therapy more deeply was actually a lapse in integrity from my Lyme doctor. ⁓ So I basically had found out that

She had been a patient had been taking a medication that was an extremely expensive medication. It cost $20,000 a month and she had a few months to apply but was no longer going to be taking the medication. And so she brought it back to the doctor and said, can you give this to someone that can't afford it? And the doctor turned around and sold it at full price to another patient. And when I found that out,

Andrew Valenti (09:21)
Wow.

Kate Hinkens (09:41)
It made me... I think it broke something in me, this like deep trust that I had, this sort of giving over of my power and this giving over of my like body and my will to somebody who I thought was smarter than me. And it made me understand like, just like every other industry, the chronic illness industry is an industry and they don't really know what they're doing and are kind of trying to make money.

And there's nothing wrong with capitalism. Like I'm not an anti-capitalist by any stretch of the imagination. But there is an integrity piece. I think that was really, really disappointing to me. And from that point, I found out that day I stopped taking every medication that she gave me and I stopped going back. I said, I'll never go back there. And I started from my bed on my computer.

reading research papers about bee venom therapy. So I was on PubMed just reading through research and I started to understand like, yes, this is ancient medicine. However, we understand exactly how this works. We understand on a chemical level why bee venom is such a powerful substance, not only for the treatment of Lyme disease, but also it's being studied for use in breast, prostate and ovarian cancer.

for Alzheimer's and dementia treatment, for HIV preventative drugs. There are all of these different applications and we understand this incredible chemical compound that is bee venom and how it works. And so for me, it came from this very like intellectual meets intuitive place of being like, this feels right and I understand it. And I ordered bees online.

You can buy them online and they get sent to your door in just a normal mailing box. The box is like vibrating when you get it. And I stood in my bathroom with my tweezers and my hands were shaking and I started stinging myself. And that was how it began for me.

Andrew Valenti (11:42)
Sure,

Wow. So I'm curious where these research papers, where were these coming from? Were they coming from the United States specifically or were they coming from all around the world?

Kate Hinkens (12:07)
Kind of all over the world. I mean, there are some universities that do research ⁓ within the United States on bee venom therapy, but a lot of them are international as well. So it was kind of all over.

Andrew Valenti (12:22)
how did you get over that fear, that initial sting, or do you still have it? Is it still like, because that's tricky. Being a gardener, I've gotten stung countless times, right? But I've always said it's it's free acupuncture, right? And I said that without even knowing that bee venom therapy was even a thing. It's a brand new thing to my whole concept.

Kate Hinkens (12:29)
I mean.

I bet.

Totally.

really?

Okay.

Andrew Valenti (12:50)
Yeah,

mean, finding you on Instagram was the first that I ever heard of it.

Kate Hinkens (12:57)
so cool that you had that intuitive understanding of it being like acupuncture, because actually, like if you look at the history of bee venom therapy, what's so cool is that some anthropologists believe that it was like one of the earliest ways that people started developing acupuncture. So there in like ancient Japanese and Chinese and Korean medicine.

Andrew Valenti (13:14)
Mmm.

Kate Hinkens (13:21)
⁓ Bee venom is used pretty widely, and I was in Japan and Korea last year kind of seeking out some of the old masters in that realm. There's also a lineage of ⁓ Kenyan ⁓ bee venom therapy that they've built basically an entire acupuncture system around, so it totally makes sense. It is free acupuncture when you get stung by a bee. But to answer your question about the fear portion of things, I was terrified.

My family, I have the most incredible family in the world and they're so supportive of me, but they were like, Kate, this is crazy. ⁓ My friends all thought it was insane. ⁓ And I was so afraid because obviously there's the risk of being allergic. There's the risk of developing an allergy. It's really painful also, like when you're intentionally stinging yourself and you're primarily stinging on either side of your spine.

And so it's a fairly sensitive area that you're stinging on. ⁓ And so it was really, really scary. But I think that the thing that kept me going was that within like two to three weeks, I would say, of starting to sting, I started to feel a difference in how I was feeling. And so the first thing that came kind of back online for me was that I would have these moments where I would start to think clearly again. And I was like,

⁓ I just thought a thought all the way through. Or like, I could write a complete sentence in my journal. It was such these like small little moments of feeling like my brain, feeling less depersonalized again. And that was the thing that kept me going. And within, you know, a month, you're not afraid anymore. And you realize how like beautiful and gentle and sweet the bees are. And that even if they escape from their little enclosure, they're not trying to attack you.

And now, of course, I've become a beekeeper and grown to love them so deeply. So there's not fear anymore.

Andrew Valenti (15:18)
All right.

Now, as far as other things that you're doing in your life, does diet play a factor when you're doing BVT? And I'm gonna start just saying BVT. ⁓ Like, it, you have to be, because it's so powerful of a thing, do you have to be supplementing while you're doing it? ⁓ Like, what are some of the other things that you're doing or other precautions that you had to do while doing the therapy?

Kate Hinkens (15:43)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, that's a great thing to bring up because it's not just stinging yourself with bees. Like that is...

one very key part of what we're doing, but ⁓ when you're using a toxin as a medicine, it is putting stress on your body. Your liver and kidneys have to process everything that goes into your system, and you're putting something into your body that your body recognizes as a toxin. So the biggest risk of bee venom therapy beyond anaphylaxis is creating damage to the liver and kidneys. And so a lot of what you're doing is in supporting the liver

and kidneys, both with supplements and with detox. And so the detox portion of things is extremely important when you're doing bee venom therapy, because when you're killing anything off in the body, so let's use the Lyme example, ⁓ when the Lyme bacteria dies, all of the contents from inside of that bacteria are released into your bloodstream, and they call that endotoxic die-off.

And so endotoxins, after you're doing bee venom therapy, are circulating through your bloodstream. They change the alkalinity of your blood that can cause a lot of symptoms. ⁓ But it's also just this massive burden on your body to get rid of things. using detox modalities, whether it is sauna or coffee enemas or dry brushing or castor oil packs, all of the classical detox tools that we have.

is really important in support of bee venom therapy. And then on the dietary side of things, you do really need to be quite careful because one of the big things about bee venom is that it is triggering a histamine and mast cell response in the body. so mast cells are this type of immune cell and they hold on to a bunch of different signaling molecules.

one of those signaling molecules is histamine. And histamine is the thing that we know of, that we think of with classical allergic reactions like the hives, ⁓ you know, changes in the heart rate, the tightening of the throat, like all of those things are classical histamine reactions. ⁓ And when you are adding bee venom into the picture, bee venom itself contains histamine and

So you're adding to the histamine load on your body. ⁓ And then also, bee venom contains something called mast cell degranulating peptide, which causes mast cells to release the signaling molecules that are inside of them. And so you have this increased histamine load on your body. And so when it comes to diet, you need to focus on ⁓ a lower histamine anti-inflammatory diet to make sure that you're not increasing risk for yourself.

Andrew Valenti (18:54)
So what would that look like? Like what was your diet like during this?

Kate Hinkens (18:58)
Yeah, so

I mean, basically with histamine, the things that create histamine are the processes of ripening, fermentation, and aging. And so it's a process that happens ⁓ to the different proteins, fats, carbs over time that will convert some of them into histamine. And so you can't be eating any...

aged meats or cheeses, you can't eat anything fermented, definitely no alcohol, you're reducing and completely cutting out any kind of processed sugar. And then there are also specific fruits and vegetables that are higher in histamine that you have to cut out as well, like avocados and bananas. And there's a lot of random ones that you wouldn't aren't intuitive. ⁓ But basically anything that needs to be eaten very ripe ⁓ tends to be...

higher in histamine, basically. ⁓ And so the diet that you end up with is something that's pretty clean. ⁓ It's primarily focused on protein and vegetables is the basis of it with some lower sugar fruits.

Andrew Valenti (19:56)
Interesting.

Now did you study this in college? Because you're saying a lot of really big words. did you study, what did you go to school for?

Kate Hinkens (20:14)
you

I went to school for film and entrepreneurship. I went to school at University of Southern California and just fell in love with kind of the way that I didn't go in planning to be a film major, but I loved a lot of things and it felt like the ⁓ way to study everything felt like film to me because you can kind of look at any part of the world through this like lens of.

film and storytelling and I think I do have this like deep curiosity of just like diving into different worlds. ⁓ But interestingly, I thought I was bad at science to be totally frank. ⁓ The one panic attack I've ever had in my life was in a high school chemistry class during a test. Like I was not naturally inclined ⁓ towards science, but what's so cool and has been such an amazing ⁓

sort of mirror for me an experience is falling in love with science because of how much I care about this. Like, I have become so deeply invested in and like in love with the science of it all because it's a subject matter that I care about. And so this has really been primarily self-taught and from a very organic place.

Andrew Valenti (21:39)
Yeah, mean, ⁓ it shows that you really went deep into this. ⁓ Now, I'm curious, ⁓ because when I went through, when I had Lyme disease in my early 20s, I went through a ⁓ heavy, round, it was like a one month dose of ⁓ doxycycline, the antibiotic.

Kate Hinkens (21:46)
Yes, I've gone deep.

Andrew Valenti (22:05)
And when I was on that, it felt worse than the Lyme disease symptoms that I was experiencing. and then it just like wrecked my whole gut microbiome and everything that antibiotics will do. Now I'm curious to get into the science a little bit, like why, why the antibiotics and these, these other medicines and all those other modalities that you were doing from the doctor's orders weren't

Kate Hinkens (22:17)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Valenti (22:32)
working and what the difference is between why that doesn't work and why the bee venom therapy really did work for you. Like what's happening there on a scientific chemistry level.

Kate Hinkens (22:45)
Let's first talk about why the antibiotics worked for you, because I think that's a really important thing for people to understand, because I am not, like, against antibiotics by any stretch of the imagination. The thing is, with Lyme disease, if you catch it early enough, you 100 % should take the antibiotics, and they work.

Andrew Valenti (22:49)
Okay, yeah.

Sure, yeah.

Kate Hinkens (23:05)
even though you had the fallout of like bad symptoms during the antibiotics and having to repair your gut afterwards, it is 100 % worth it if you catch it early enough. So antibiotics are an amazing tool for Lyme. Doxy and some other antibiotics have very reliably been shown to kill early stage Lyme. Now, this is where it starts to get interesting is...

Andrew Valenti (23:17)
Yeah.

Kate Hinkens (23:29)
We don't know the exact timeline, but anywhere from like a few weeks to a few months afterwards, the Lyme bacteria, once it's, you know, in its host, will start to form biofilms around itself. And so these are sort of like protective shields that start to make it impenetrable to antibiotics. And so you were able to catch it early enough that the biofilms hadn't fully been formed yet around the Lyme bacteria.

And so the antibiotics were able to be effective. So the thing that everybody should take away from this is it's all in prevention. And so if you ever get bitten by a tick, you should first of all save the tick and send it in for testing and then immediately get on a course of antibiotics whether or not you feel any impact from, like if you feel like you're getting sick or not, because it's not worth the risk of getting chronic Lyme. ⁓

So basically chronic Lyme is characterized by like this thing that happens once the biofilms have formed and the Lyme starts to be able to hide in the body. And this is where the antibiotics stop being effective. The herbal treatments become less effective. All of the normal things that we have in our arsenal don't work as well. Now let's talk about the science of bee venom and why it's able to kind of overcome some of those obstacles.

So bee venom has something called melaton in it, which is able to break through the biofilms that surround both the Lyme bacteria, but also a lot of other hard to treat bacterias and viruses. And the melaton is able to basically burrow holes through the biofilms, go in and kill the bacteria that's living inside of the biofilms. And so that portion of it is fascinating in and of itself.

The other really cool thing about ⁓ bee venom is that it contains something called apamine. And apamine is one of the smallest known neurotoxic polypeptides. Basically, it just means that it's able to very easily cross the blood-brain barrier and is also able to act as a shuttle for other compounds across the blood-brain barrier. ⁓ So it's able to carry things with it. So that's why it's being ⁓ researched right now in a lot of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's drugs.

⁓ in part because it's able to cross the blood-brain barrier and act as the shuttle. Now, a lot of the symptoms that people experience from Lyme, all of the brain fog, the fatigue, the memory loss, even a lot of the ⁓ mental health symptoms, like the instances of depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia in people that have Lyme are significantly higher than the normal population, and it's very often brought on by the Lyme bacteria.

And so the ability of bee venom to cross the blood-brain barrier and address Lyme and other bacteria and viruses that live in the brain is so, so important. ⁓ And so we have, those are kind of the two like famous best researched ones. Then you also have a lot of other compounds. have...

Adalapin, which is a super powerful pain reliever and anti-inflammatory. So a lot of people use bee venom therapy for arthritis applications, and it has extremely strong anti-inflammatory effects in that way. The other really cool thing about bee venom therapy is the way that it interacts with your immune system.

So a lot of people who have chronic illness end up with some level of immune dysregulation, either manifesting in full on autoimmune conditions or just a general like immune dysregulation where their immune system is either weak or is overactive. ⁓ Both sides of the spectrum are not good. And what tends to happen is that when your body knows something that there is something to fight,

it will start to have an imbalance in your immune cell types. So you end up with not enough active regulatory T cells, which are sort of the like on-off switch of the immune system and too many of the T helper 17 cells, which are like the attack cells. And so you end up with this imbalance that happens where there's too much attacking going on and not enough regulation going on, which leads eventually to autoimmunity.

Andrew Valenti (27:48)
Okay.

Kate Hinkens (27:58)
And what's so cool is that bee venom over time has been shown to rebalance the immune cell types by increasing the differentiation of regulatory T-cells. So you end up with a more balanced immune system and your body is able to better address and fight things. The other really cool thing about bee venom is its ability to work on inflammation. So it's a little bit counterintuitive because...

You think stung by a bee, there's swelling, it looks inflamed. And that's true. It is inflammation, but that is acute inflammation. So basically bee venom causes acute inflammation, but systemic anti-inflammatory effects. So although you're getting inflammation when you get stung, over time it actually causes the inflammatory cytokines to be less active.

and cause less inflammatory signaling over time. And so many of our diseases and chronic illnesses that we deal with are inflammation-based. And so if you are able to bring down overall systemic inflammation, the symptomology of those illnesses is gonna be vastly reduced.

Andrew Valenti (29:10)
Wow,

Now I'm seeing a lot about the Lone Star tick now running wild and spreading this thing called Alpha Gal, which is a...

Kate Hinkens (29:23)
Yes.

Andrew Valenti (29:28)
Do you know much about this you might know more about this than than I've just heard do you know about this? Yeah Can you talk a little bit about that and because from what I understand and My father actually just he he got bit by a Lone Star tick and can no longer eat red meat and he's also he can't have any dairy products, so Explain what's what's happening there? What alpha Gal is and what that's all about

Kate Hinkens (29:33)
The red meat allergy. Yes, yes.

Yes. So basically, alpha gal is specifically from, like you said, the Lone Star ticks. And when they bite you, it's a type of sugar actually, that's like in the saliva that they inject into you. And that causes your immune system to like mistakenly respond ⁓ to meat and in some cases, dairy as well as a like pathogen as an issue. And so...

This ends up being a huge issue because it completely changes the way people are able to exist. And in some cases, I don't know how severe your dad's is, but for some people it's a full on like anaphylactic allergy to red meat. Now the issue, really?

Andrew Valenti (30:39)
Yeah, my sister-in-law with that one, yeah.

Yeah, the NFL access, yeah.

Kate Hinkens (30:46)
Yeah, it's really, really horrible. And the problem is, is there isn't a ton of great research around alpha-gal. Like, this is very new in the research space. And so, I haven't been able to find a single study that looks at the efficacy of bee venom for alpha-gal specifically. ⁓ There are a lot of anecdotal reports of alpha-gal being improved by bee venom therapy. But the big piece of caution that I have to put over this is that

whenever you're dealing with allergic reactions, bee venom will increase initially your reactivity to things. And so if you're a person that has alpha-gal and is going to do bee venom therapy, you have to be extremely careful about...

reducing mast cell activation and reducing other histamine inputs when you're undertaking bee venom therapy. So unfortunately, it's all pretty new and all the treatments that exist are only experimental. And so we don't know if bee venom works for this yet, but some anecdotal reports say it does.

Andrew Valenti (31:57)
recently posted a video on Instagram about queen bees and how they're selected because they are fed the royal jelly, And you said that there's something about the royal jelly that is, there's something, it's a protein in that jelly. Now I wonder if they're, you know, maybe it's not the bee venom, but if bees can produce something else

helps people. Like what are some of the other products or things that bees naturally produce that help us? Like how powerful is honey in itself or royal jelly or bee palm?

Kate Hinkens (32:26)
Mm-hmm.

I mean, this is what's so crazy about the bees is like, so bees have been around for over 150 million years ago. They started evolving away from wasps and they are one of the few animals that has built out basically like an entire medicine system for themselves.

And we can look at the way that they use those medicines in their hive and kind of use that as a corollary to like how they could be helpful for humans. So like in your example talking about rytal jelly and what I was talking about in that video was that ⁓ queen bees are genetically identical to all of the other worker bees. There's nothing like special about a queen bee. The way that a queen bee egg develops into a queen that is far bigger lives

⁓ Queen Bee will live like five years, whereas a worker bee lives six weeks. She has massive epigenetic changes just from her diet, and she is fed royal jelly. And royal jelly is actually a secretion that comes out of the top of worker bees' heads. It's a wild thing. And they feed that to her. They feed it to all the larvae for the first couple of days, but for the queen bee, it's fed to her her entire life.

Andrew Valenti (33:43)
Wow.

Kate Hinkens (33:52)
and it contains something called royal lactin, ⁓ which basically causes her ⁓ ovaries and all of her hormones to surge and like her reproductive organs to become active. Now, then when we look at that in humans and how we can apply that to human medicine, in a lot of ancient ⁓ Eastern medicine, royal jelly is one of the first things that they'll give women who are struggling with infertility.

⁓ And a friend of mine actually ⁓ used it in her process of getting pregnant and felt that it was really helpful for her. And so it is really cool how there is that like corollary of like fertility working in that way. Then we have propolis. And propolis is sort of like the protection and immune system of the hive. What propolis is, is basically bees go...

to the sap of trees or any leaf that has stickiness on it, and they collect resin and sap from all of these different nature sources. And then they combine it with the enzymes in their saliva, basically to make this very thick, sticky, dark goo. And they use it to line the inside of the hive. So I don't know, have you ever opened a beehive?

Andrew Valenti (35:13)
I have, yes.

Kate Hinkens (35:14)
Yeah, and so you have, and you see that like rim of the sticky propolis like around the lid usually that you kind of have to like crack open.

Andrew Valenti (35:22)
Yeah, use that

little tool to crack it open. Yeah, yeah.

Kate Hinkens (35:26)
Exactly, yeah. And so the propolis is the hive's immune system. And so it has all of these very strong antibacterial properties from the plants that they are taking it from. ⁓ And so it's sort of like part of the hive's immune system.

when the hive is struggling with something, that you'll see like they'll build out more propolis, like if there's a disease that's coming around or ⁓ more robber bees that are trying to steal from them, they'll use propolis to kind of build protection. ⁓ And funny enough, this is just a random aside, but when the fires were happening ⁓ in California last year,

I was away and so my hives were just like at my house. And when I got back after the fires that had gotten quite close to our house, ⁓ the bees had almost completely sealed up the front entrance using propolis. So they'd built like a wall of propolis. So when we think about propolis, we have to think about like protection. And so then when that applies to humans...

we think about immunity. so propolis is absolutely incredible for immunity. It's one of the first things, like when you're getting sick, you 100 % should be taking propolis, zinc, vitamin D, but like propolis is key in helping support your immune system. It also has been shown to help heal ⁓ the spaces that occur when you start to get leaky gut.

So it's really amazing if you are dealing with SIBO, Candida, any of the kind of gut issues that we so commonly deal with. It's a great like reparative and protective agent. Then we have honey and honey is amazing for so many different reasons beyond being delicious. ⁓ It now is actually being used in hospitals in wound dressings. And

It has been shown to be far more effective than any of the manufactured ⁓ wound healing creams is to apply Manuka honey directly to wounds. I was with a friend of mine a few months ago who is paralyzed and he's in a wheelchair and he was telling me that he was getting bed sores from sitting so much.

and they had tried everything else to try to get rid of the bed sores and then literally just started applying honey to the bed sores and that was the thing that actually made them heal. And so you have this incredible like wound healing property of honey, but then you also have the fact that if you are eating local honey, it can also help people with allergies. ⁓ And so you have this incredible, basically because you're microdosing,

the pollen and nectar from flowers that you're allergic to. But the difference is in that the bee's saliva has partially broken down that pollen so that your body is able to learn how to better respond to it. And then also on the allergy front, bee pollen is super, super cool to talk about ⁓ because bee pollen...

The bees combine the pollen directly from flowers, and then they have enzymes in their saliva that break down the proteins in the pollen, because the proteins in pollen are really, really hard for your body to digest. Bees have a specialized digestive system to break down proteins in pollen, ⁓ but the human body does not, which is part of the reason that they can be so allergenic for us. And so you eat pollen from local plants, and you...

slowly, like building up literally one grain at a time if you have severe allergies, can actually help to desensitize seasonal allergies. And I've seen this be so helpful for so many people with seasonal allergies.

Andrew Valenti (39:33)
so cool. They're the coolest thing. One thing that I do wherever I travel or wherever I move to, one of the first things that I'll buy is I'll find some local honey. Just to acclimate myself to, I feel like it acclimates myself to the local surroundings. so many.

Kate Hinkens (39:38)
They really are.

Yeah.

As a gardener,

I'm curious ⁓ because, so obviously we have honeybees, which was kind of what we're primarily talking about right now. And then we have like the over 3000 other species of bees. And I'm really curious to learn from you about a lot of the stuff that we're hearing about, like the competition between.

honeybees and native bees and whether there are even conversations around whether like beekeeping is even ethical with honeybees ⁓ because of the like stress it's putting on native bee populations. Do you have thoughts on that?

Andrew Valenti (40:32)
You led me right into the question that I wanted to ask you. ⁓ Well, I feel like I don't see a competition necessarily because what we should be doing as gardeners, as people, as humans living...

Kate Hinkens (40:36)
⁓ okay.

Andrew Valenti (40:54)
together with nature is just growing more flowers, more flowering things for all of these pollinator species. So that there is less competition, so that there's more food, more abundance. I read recently that a single bee can visit 5,000 flowers in a single day. And that's super cool. And so we need a lot more flowers out there.

Kate Hinkens (41:16)
So cool.

you

Well, right, and habitat loss is like one of the key reasons that all pollinators are struggling right now.

Andrew Valenti (41:22)
But I also...

but I also feel like there's so much importance in the honeybee and our relationship with them. Now, I know that we don't necessarily need to keep bees in order for them to continue their survival, but bees are a keystone species. And so

our survival depends on them a large way. But I'm curious to ask you though, because...

Kate Hinkens (41:54)
⁓ huh.

And they're so integrated

into agriculture. Like we are entirely reliant on honeybees in our agricultural system, which is our own doing. Like we have created that dynamic, but we need them to feed people.

Andrew Valenti (42:00)
very much.

100%, one third of every bite of food that we take was pollinated by bee. So that's huge. That's huge. like you said, there are honeybees, there are thousands of varieties of bee, right? So when it comes to bee venom therapy, there are many questions that come to mind. And one of them is,

Kate Hinkens (42:15)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (42:32)
Does it matter what the variety of B is that you use bee venom therapy for?

Kate Hinkens (42:38)
So it needs to be a honeybee, but within that like overarching category of bees, any of the specific genetics will work. there are primarily, so none of the bees, as you know, but for the listeners, ⁓ like honeybees are not native to America at all.

They are all from... there's like European honeybees, there's Russian honeybees, there's African honeybees. Those are like the primary genetics that the honeybees that we now have in America are drawn from. Within any of those lineages of honeybees, all of those bees are going to have venom that's active. There is a difference though in the composition of the venom based on the genetics of the bee, which is really interesting. So bees

the African genetics of honey bees tend to have a lot more melaton ⁓ in their sting, which makes them more painful, but also have higher cancer killing and lime killing abilities. ⁓ And so you kind of end up with a different mix of all of the different compounds of bee venom ⁓ in each bee that you get. So that's why some bee stings don't hurt that much and some hurt a lot.

Andrew Valenti (43:55)
sense. So there are no native honey bees in North America?

Kate Hinkens (44:02)
No, no, there aren't any native honeybees. They were brought over by Catholic missionaries ⁓ because there was a church doctrine at the time that the candles burned in Catholic masses had to be made of...

beeswax ⁓ because they were seen as like more pure because the other candles available that time were made out of animal fats ⁓ and so the beeswax burned super cleanly ⁓ and so they literally brought on a multi-month journey over on boats, hives of bees first to South America and then eventually into Central and North America. So honey bees are not

native and that's part of the discussion that's happening right now is like are we ⁓ displacing native bees by having so many honeybee hives?

Andrew Valenti (45:07)
you said this early on in the conversation that it is a different species from a wasp, correct? And yellow jackets and hornets, other stinging, flying things.

Kate Hinkens (45:15)
Yes. Yeah.

Yes, very different. And unfortunately, the venom of wasps and hornets and all of that does not work the same. It has some of the same compounds in it, but unfortunately, it's not as medicinal for like the specific applications we've been talking about. But they started basically like diverging from each other, like I mentioned about 150 million years ago, where the wasps started

being carnivorous and like eating meat and feeding in that way, whereas the bees kind of became like, I think they call them polypores, like pollen eaters, ⁓ and started diverging over time.

Andrew Valenti (46:01)
And I'm gonna assume you say unfortunately because the honeybee when it stings more times than not, its stinger will be released and then that bee will die. So let's talk about that because there's a really interesting point about bee venom therapy. So one, it necessary for the stinger to remain in the skin? talk about

The dilemma of that, of taking a bee's life. Yeah.

Kate Hinkens (46:29)
Yeah. Yeah,

absolutely. I think this conversation is so important because obviously...

bees are extremely important. I love bees and have like dedicated my life to bees in many ways. And so obviously the fact that a bee dies when you're using it for a bee venom therapy is a huge ethical concern. ⁓ So the reason a bee dies when it stings you is because they have barbed stingers. And so it's kind of like a fish hook, like once it goes into your skin, because our skin is elastic, it doesn't come out very easily. ⁓ And the wasps have

and other stinging insects in that category have smooth stingers, so they can sting as many times as they want. And so honey bees do die when we use them for bee venom therapy, ⁓ which I think we need to look at like the slightly bigger picture of as well. So bees live six weeks and in the summer,

on any given day, a queen will lay between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs of new bees hatching. And in an entire two-year course of bee venom therapy, a person will use on average between 2,000 and 3,000 bees. So in the overall impact on a specific colony,

you're not actually impacting population numbers in any significant way at all. The other huge thing we need to focus on is the real reason that bees are struggling and dying at such an alarming rate. So commercial beekeepers are on average losing two thirds of their colony every single year, and that number is only increasing. Why are commercial beekeepers losing so many bees? Because of our bad agriculture practices. So what...

Bees are being exposed to pesticides, can kill their gut bacteria, it ruins their navigational sense so they can't find their way back home, ⁓ causes them to be more susceptible to all of the diseases that are going on. ⁓ Then we also have monocropping, which has been shown to ruin their gut bacteria, just as if we were to only eat one food, we would end up having very limited gut bacteria. The same thing is true for bees.

only pollinating almonds, they are going to be have much weaker immune systems and much more likely to die. The other thing is what we touched on earlier, which is land use changes. Nobody has wildflowers in their garden anymore. Nobody has flowering plants in their gardens anymore. We have lawns. And so there just isn't enough food for these pollinators to eat. And so the thing to understand about bee venom therapy is that, yes, on an individual level, it's not good to kill a bee. Like, duh.

⁓ But we need to understand that the actual things that we can do to help bee populations ⁓ have nothing to do with bee venom therapy. And bee venom therapy gives ⁓ beekeepers an alternative revenue source that allows them to be more selective about who they're renting their bees out to for crop pollination so they're able to better protect their bees from pesticides.

Andrew Valenti (49:42)
Really good point. I didn't realize that about the gut microbiome, but that makes so much sense.

Kate Hinkens (49:49)
I mean, and that's, it's a

huge dilemma too, right? Because like the reason that agriculture is organized that way, and you could probably speak to it a lot more than I could, is because it makes the harvesting easier. It's like easier on, you know, for mass scale production. Obviously it's not easy when you have a garden that has a bunch of different things in it to harvest on like a huge scale. And so the question is like, can we create more biodiversity while maintaining scale of these things? And the answer is, don't know.

Andrew Valenti (50:18)
That's the golden answer there. Or the big question that so many people are trying to figure out because we need this biodiversity. We need to increase biodiversity. And things have been, like you said,

developed in a way that is hyper efficient. Like we've got these long straight rows of the same things and we've developed these huge machines that can just go and harvest and plant and just one person can do all of that. And we know what time of year it's gonna happen, but when you're increasing biodiversity, you know, you're...

You're seeing different times when things are ripening, different times when things are planted and harvested, all of that. huge thing for so many people to just think about people in the agricultural space to address. And we're thinking about our bees too, when we're doing this as well.

so you're a beekeeper yourself. journey of yours, what are some of the most fascinating facts about bees? Like kind of the fun facts that most people don't really understand or realize. What are some fun facts that you can share?

Kate Hinkens (51:34)
Okay. Honey is essentially bee vomit. So basically the way... Did you know this? Okay. So when bees collect nectar, they drink it. it goes... Bees have two separate stomachs. They have a honey stomach and then like their digestive tract stomach. They put it into their honey stomach.

Andrew Valenti (51:43)
No, no.

Kate Hinkens (52:00)
Then when they get back to the hive, they vomit it into the mouth of another bee, and so that it can mix with the enzymes from that bee's honey stomach. And then that bee vomits it into the mouth of another bee. And so it like goes down a little train of bees, basically like regurgitating or vomiting the nectar into the mouths of the other bees.

Andrew Valenti (52:25)
Whoa.

Kate Hinkens (52:26)
and

then they eventually deposit it into the cell and then they flap their wings to evaporate the honey or the nectar into honey and that's what creates honey. But people don't understand, like, it's literally a bee vomit, essentially, which is a cool one.

Andrew Valenti (52:42)
Wow,

that's really cool. Wait, so question on that then. So when they take the nectar, they have two stomachs. They drink the nectar, it goes into the honey stomach. And then when they regurgitate it, does that go into the other bee's digestive tract or does that go into the honey stomach as well? And so like, is the, it's all the honey stomach. So what do they eat?

Kate Hinkens (53:05)
All the honey stomach.

Andrew Valenti (53:12)
that doesn't go under the honey stomach.

Kate Hinkens (53:15)
So they will eat a combination of, they will eat nectar and or honey. So like they will eat it directly from a flower, but they'll also eat the then like fully finished honey from the hive. And then one of their primary food sources for like when the colony is growing is called bee bread. And bee bread is pollen that is then mixed with nectar. And if you've ever seen on like a,

comb of bees, or like a what's it called a honeycomb, you see the cells filled with pollen. But when you buy pollen in the grocery store, it's in little balls. The little balls that you buy in the grocery store are directly from the backs of bees legs when they are like flying back.

with the pollen, but the bee bread is literally like a fermented product that bees make by fermenting pollen with nectar. And that's their primary protein source, especially when they're trying to raise new young.

Andrew Valenti (54:16)
I've had bee bread and it's amazing. It makes me feel really good.

Kate Hinkens (54:19)
It's cool.

Yeah, what do you feel?

Andrew Valenti (54:24)
I mean, it just feels like I took like a like a multivitamin. If I have it in the morning, it just feels like I took this multivitamin energy thing produced by sunshine and bees.

Kate Hinkens (54:29)
Mm-hmm.

Well, yeah, and it's super rich in all of the like B complex vitamins. And so it does have like an impact on, you know, energy metabolism and all that. So that totally makes sense. That's cool.

Andrew Valenti (54:50)
Now, but you

I do want to bring up the ethical moral dilemma of bee pollen. Is that something that's, you know, I go back and forth with whether I feel good about consuming that or not because it is taken off the back legs of the bees. Now, is there a good way to harvest that without hurting the bee?

Kate Hinkens (55:17)
So the harvesting process, the way it's done now, does sometimes hurt the bees because basically bees have these little like pollen pants that they fly where they like store the pollen onto, and then when they fly back to the hive it's a little board that kind of like catches the bee pollen, but can also sometimes catch the bees or get them entangled in it, which can hurt the bees. ⁓ I think that

Andrew Valenti (55:28)
Yeah.

Kate Hinkens (55:47)
there are some beekeepers that do it better than others. Like, part of it's just about scale. Like, you want to source bee pollen in a way that's ethical, ideally from, like, a local beekeeper who's not taking a lot of pollen. ⁓ The other option is to eat bee bread because that is... has not been harvested, like, off the backs of bee legs.

Andrew Valenti (56:08)
the bee brand, has a lot more benefits too because it's more of a product, right?

Kate Hinkens (56:15)
Totally. It's how they eat it. So yeah. Okay. Another cool beef act.

Andrew Valenti (56:21)
Yeah, please.

Kate Hinkens (56:22)
Okay, so the way that bees make decisions is more like how the neurons in our brains work together to make decisions than it is like any other group of animals. So you have like a pack of wolves and they are all individuals and they make decisions just like humans would, like as individuals making decisions. But the way that a bee, that bees work is more like neurons in a brain. And so

when they are trying to make a decision, the individual bee will kind of like fire as a neuron by like presenting their idea. So let's say ⁓ they're about to swarm and they're trying to decide on a new location. The scout bee will dance and kind of like a neuron firing, the goal of a neuron firing is to try to get other neurons to fire along with it, to kind of like agree with that field of thought.

And that's how it works. And basically, it's about the enthusiasm with which the bee presents its case, ⁓ which ends up determining sort of the neuronal pathway of the overall hive mind. And so people think that the queen is in charge and the queen is the one making the decisions. It's not the queen. It's all of the worker bees acting like neurons in our brains ⁓ making decisions together. So that's kind of a fun one, too.

Andrew Valenti (57:44)
Whoa.

Wow. That's cool.

Kate Hinkens (57:47)
And then we

have the geometry of the bee hive. we have, like, you know, when you look at honeycomb, it's in these amazing, like, perfect hexagonal shapes. ⁓ And so the way that the bees actually make those is so interesting because they make perfect cylinders. Like, they make perfect circles. And then...

because of the heat of their bodies, it is heated up to just the right temperature so that it melts just enough for all of the different circles to settle together. And then the natural geometry, because a hexagon is the most ⁓ efficient shape for holding the largest volume with the smallest amount of material, ⁓ basically it will organize into hexagons, which is really cool.

Andrew Valenti (58:40)
So it's the...

Kate Hinkens (58:40)
So it really is like this intelligence

of nature.

Andrew Valenti (58:43)
Yeah, so it's the, so the bees aren't fabricating those shapes. It's the heat that they emit that makes that.

Kate Hinkens (58:52)
Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (58:55)
So cool. then I also just think about the vibration of bees too. And you've spoken about this too, like the benefits of vibration. I mean, we know that there are healing modalities that look directly towards vibration, know, when we listen to Hertz Is there any research going into the Hertz of a bee?

Kate Hinkens (58:55)
on one.

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Valenti (59:18)
Buzz.

Kate Hinkens (59:19)
Yeah.

So the

Research that made me initially interested in the sort of like vibrational space of the bees was around ⁓ people who had PTSD. ⁓ They took some war veterans who had PTSD and had them go and like sit by beehives and just listen to the bees. And it dramatically reduced their cortisol, their stress levels, and their PTSD symptoms overall. And there is sort of this like

responsive resonance that happens when you're by a beehive. Now on the specific hertz part of it, it's more of like a range because bees, just like humans, have different moods. And so some people say that like a happy beehive has the same frequency as like the love frequency, which I think is 432 hertz. I might be wrong about that. I'm not a sound expert. ⁓ But...

Andrew Valenti (1:00:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Kate Hinkens (1:00:15)
you can absolutely feel it, and I think that was even just a part of my own healing, is once I started keeping bees, every time still, before I open a beehive, I sit down next to the hive and I put my face on the hive and just like feel it. And when it's through the wood, you can't like hear the buzz as loudly, it's more like you feel sort of this like very gentle...

vibration. And there are entire ⁓ sort of modalities and therapies around this. Like you have those bee beds. Have you ever seen these? Where you lay on top of beehives, which is really, really cool. ⁓ And you start to actually

Andrew Valenti (1:00:51)
Yes.

Mm-hmm and whole whole houses

too that they put the bees in the walls and you kind of sit in this tiny house surrounded by bees for the heat and the vibration. Yeah

Kate Hinkens (1:01:05)
Exactly, yeah. And you can feel it when you're around the beehive that even if you're kind of going in a little bit anxious or scattered, once you're there, you kind of feel the energetic ⁓ drop of it all, which I think is really cool.

Andrew Valenti (1:01:20)
you your own bee boxes? Is that what I've seen you, are you selling these, your own bee venom therapy boxes now?

Kate Hinkens (1:01:29)
So my dad is amazing and he helped me like just design a bee box and so we're not we're not selling them commercially at this point. He just made those for me and for some of my my friends and my clients. But primarily what I do is I teach people how to self-administer bee venom therapy. So I both work with people one-on-one and then I also have an online video course that walks people through

Andrew Valenti (1:01:39)
Okay.

Kate Hinkens (1:01:58)
all the things that they would need to know in order to self-administer bee venom therapy for chronic illness. So it's a lot of people who have Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr virus, long COVID, autoimmune conditions. Those are kind of like the primary ones I am seeing most often. And so I've built out sort of this structure that basically what I wish I had had and kind of support that I wish I had had in this process ⁓ to walk them through like how to build the right

how to build the right supplement routine. I go through everybody's lab work individually to make sure that their body can handle the venom therapy and is in a solid enough place. So that's primarily my work right now.

Andrew Valenti (1:02:41)
Okay, great. strengthened or changed your connection to nature in general? Because you came from a background of yoga and a very holistic mindset from a young age. So how has this brought you closer to the natural world?

Kate Hinkens (1:03:04)
Isn't it funny that a tick was the thing that got me sick and a bee was the thing that got me better? And I think it's so beautiful because it's an understanding of like the duality a little bit of nature and the way in which like nature always has a response to itself.

Right? Like, I do think nature often provides medicines and even so many of our modern pharmaceuticals are taken from natural sources originally or based on natural sources originally. And so I think it's only strengthened my love and deep respect for nature and also just the understanding of how we think that nature is separate from us or something that we need to connect to.

Andrew Valenti (1:03:30)
Mmm, yeah.

Kate Hinkens (1:03:57)
But it actually just like, we are nature, just as much as a bee is nature or a tree is nature. Like, we are a part of it. And I think that the teaching of the bees for me has been the teaching of reciprocity, which is the language of nature.

there is always this give and take, and we have to understand our role in that give and take with all of the other beans and plants that surround us. And so we can take and we can enjoy and we can be healed by literally given life by these things, and it is also incumbent upon us to be in reciprocity with them and give back in the ways that we know how to.

Andrew Valenti (1:04:44)
Beautiful. Very well said. So we need to go plant more flowers.

Kate Hinkens (1:04:49)
Plant more flowers! Yes,

100%.

Andrew Valenti (1:04:59)
What is one of your favorite food memories?

Kate Hinkens (1:05:07)
Watermelon. We, when I was a kid, well actually when my mom was pregnant with me, she had a lot of food aversions but really, really loved.

watermelon and so would eat just like half a watermelon instead of having dinner and then as kids I have the fondest memories of getting like this amazing juicy summer watermelon and like fresh cold from the fridge and me and my siblings would like all sit around the table and just like eat watermelon and Yeah, I think it's like one of my happiest foods for me

Andrew Valenti (1:05:49)
getting into that season. you're the first person to throw back at me. Yeah, yeah. It is. you know, it often goes back. Well, the first thing that comes to mind for me is Friday night pizza. So every, every Friday night growing up my, in our house, we would make

Kate Hinkens (1:05:50)
What's your favorite food memory?

Really? I think it's such a fun one. I love that question.

Andrew Valenti (1:06:19)
homemade pizza. it was like in the morning, my dad would start the dough. It was just like a yeast based dough. So he'd start it before work. It would rise all day. And then, you know, Friday night meant just pizza. And it was the one night of the week because I grew up in a, you know, my mom liked to have ⁓ healthy foods around. But pizza night was the one night a week that we got to have soda.

So that was always fun. yeah, was like pizza with soda and then we got to watch a movie or it was like, I was a kid in the 90s, so was TGIF, which was like a television program of all the different shows that they had. And yeah, Friday night pizza, so much fun. Paper for your memory.

Kate Hinkens (1:07:01)
huh.

I love that. Have you carried

that tradition on?

Andrew Valenti (1:07:11)
⁓ Not every Friday, no, it's been a while, but my siblings, I think they still have, and I think my parents even still do, just the two of them, which is kind of cool.

Kate Hinkens (1:07:19)
Aww,

I love that, that's such a cool tradition.