Apitherapy is a branch of alternative medicine that uses honey bee products, including honey, pollen, propolis, royal jelly and bee venom.
History — References to medical properties of bee products can be found in Chinese, Korean, Russian, Egyptian and Greek traditional medicine practices. Apitherapy has been practiced since the times of Hippocrates and Galen. The more modern study of apitherapy, specifically using bee venom, was initiated by Austrian physician Philipp Terč (cs) in his 1888 article “About a Peculiar Connection Between the Bee stings and Rheumatism.” More recent alternative medicine practice is attributed to the Hungarian physician Bodog F. Beck who coined the term “bee venom therapy” in 1935, and to beekeeper Charles Mraz (1905–1999) in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1957, the USSR Ministry of Health sanctioned use of bee venom to treat certain ailments by approval of Nikolay Artemov’s “Instruction for Bee Sting Venom Apitherapy.”
[From Wikipedia-Apitherapy]
