Messner Bee Farm is a purveyor of all thing’s honey/beeswax-related. We recently stumbled across some of its locally curated salve and of course, it got us to thinking, “What the heck is salve anyway—or as they call it, royal jelly?”
We talked to owner Rachael Messner. “Royal jelly is a highly concentrated super food that bees make with pollen and nectar. All worker bees are fed a little bit of royal jelly when they are in the larva stage—but developing queen bees are fed an excess of it and that is what turns them into queens,” she says. “Queen bees can live up to 30 times longer than a worker bee. It’s one of the things that must have inspired people who started to use royal jelly for skincare thousands of years ago—and it’s inspired us too!”
Packed with protein, amino acids, complex B vitamins, and minerals, Messner’s salve combines royal jelly with beeswax, oils, butters, and raw honey “to create a buttercream-frosting-like consistency that’s a perfect deep moisturizer for your skin.” ($14)
Slather it on, says Messner. “You can use it anywhere on your body where you have dry skin. Personally, I will even use it on my arms and cheeks because I have unusually dry skin,” she says. “It may also be used in a regiment to prevent stretch marks.”