The Healing Sting w/ Kate Hinkens
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
CONNECT WITH KATE HINKENS
Website: stinglab.org
Instagram: @katehinkens
FOLLOW GARDENS OF EARTHLY DELIGHT
Substack: gardensofearthlydelight.substack.com
Instagram: @gardensofearthlydelightpod
Podcast: gardensofearthlydelight.com/subscribe
Music by: Constant Smiles
Logo design by: Hunky Kitty