Many products produced by honey bees are useful to humans, including honey, ^[1][2][10,11] which is the most important and widely consumed bee product worldwide. Honey, a “natural sweet substance produced by Apis mellifera L. bees from the nectar of plants, secretions of living parts of plants, or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in the honeycomb to ripen and mature” ^[3][12], comes in two varieties namely: blossom/nectar honey and honeydew honey. Blossom honey is made from flowering plant nectar, whereas honeydew honey is manufactured from honeydew collected from various parts of a plant or other sap-producing plants and insects ^[4][13]. Honey can be divided into two categories: unifloral (monofloral) and polyfloral (multifloral). Unifloral honey is made primarily from one type of plant nectar and is identified through pollen analysis, which reveals dominant pollen from a single plant species. Polyfloral honey does not have dominant pollen from one plant species but has a mixture of pollen from several plants ^[5][14]. Due to its refined, one-of-a-kind, and distinct flavor, unifloral honey typically commands a higher market price than polyfloral honey. The premium quality of unifloral honey mostly depends on the exclusive geographical area or the special plant species, for example, the Manuka honey from New Zealand ^[6][15]. Honey may contain probiotics that have been transmitted from the guts of honey bees during the process of making honey and may remain alive for a certain period ^[7][16]. Thus, both honey bees and honey may provide potential probiotics for future use. The health benefits of honey concerning its probiotic bacteria are that the probiotics will help to revitalize and strengthen the immune system of the host against harmful environmental factors and pathogens, aid in digestion, detoxify harmful substances and provide essential nutrients ^[8][6].

Honey is mostly made up of sugars or carbohydrates such as fructose (32–44%), glucose (23–38%), and some other complex sugars (5–15%) including sucrose, maltose, lactose, raffinose, trehalose, erlose, gentiobiose, turanose, panose, melezitose, and kojibiose amongst others ^[9][17]. Besides carbohydrates, the quality and health advantages of honey are also ascribed to the various components it possesses, such as protein, organic acids, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and polyphenols ^[10][18]. Different varieties of honey may vary in their content due to the different sources derived, such as geographical area, botanical origin, and bee species ^[9][17]. Blossom or nectar honey can be distinguished from honeydew honey by analyzing its carbohydrate concentration. Blossom honey contains higher concentrations of monosaccharides but is lower in trisaccharides (mainly melezitose, erlose, raffinose, and maltotriose) and other oligosaccharides compared to honeydew honey ^[11][19]. The honey’s prebiotic properties are known to come from its indestructible carbohydrates that cannot be fermented by digestive enzymes in humans and are not taken up in the upper intestinal tract system. They are capable of improving and enhancing health in general and intestinal health in particular by stimulating the development and promoting metabolic activity of the typical residents of the colon ^[12][20]. Honey’s prebiotic qualities can help probiotic microorganisms to flourish by supplying adequate nutrients. An increased number of probiotics may help to alleviate the total surface area for nutrient absorption, thus improving the health of the digestive system and enhancing resistance to pathogen infections ^[13][21]. These findings have sparked some ideas for conducting studies for further research on the natural microbiota of the bees’ gut with probiotic properties as a disease defense mechanism to be used as prophylaxis to treat not only bees themselves but also other animals and humans ^[8][6].

2. Probiotic Properties of Honey Bees and Honey

Table 1 highlights the studies that have been performed in several countries on honey bees’ guts and honey as the origin of potential probiotics. The majority of honey bee probiotics have been identified from A. mellifera spp., with a few from the A. cerana spp., and A. dorsata spp. Probiotics isolated from the honey bee gut were composed of diverse microorganisms including Bifidobacterium and lactic acid bacteria (LAB), as well as Fructophilic lactic acid bacteria (FLAB) which is a subgroup of LAB, yeasts, and other types of bacteria such as the Bacillus spp.

Probiotic	Source	Origin/Country	Reference
Bifidobacterium	spp.	Apis cerana japonica	gut	Tsukuba, Japan	[14]	[22]
Bifidobacterium	spp.,	Lactobacillus	spp.,	Bacillus	spp.	Apis cerana indica	gut	Samut-Songkhram, and Chumphon, Thailand	[15]	[23]
Lactobacillus	spp.	Apis cerana indica	gut	Karnataka, India	[16]	[24]
Lactobacillus plantarum	,	Lactobacillus pentosus	,	Lactobacillus fermentum	Apis dorsata	gut	Terengganu, Malaysia	[17]	[25]
Lactobacillus kunkeei	strains	Yigilca honey bee gut	Duzce, Turkey	[18
(Libya, Saudi Arabia and Egypt)
N/A
[
36
]
[
44
]
Bacillus subtilis
,
Brevibacillus brevis
,
	Bacillus megaterium	strains,	Lactobacillus acidophilus	Local honey	Iran	[37]	[45]
Bacillus subtilis	strains	Bacillus endophyticus	Mountain honey Persimmon honey (commercial)	Nigeria Egypt	[38]	[46]
Bacillus	spp.	Honey	China	[39]	[47]
Bacillus subtilis	,	Bacillus mycoides	,	Bacillus thuringiensis	,	Bacillus amyloliquefaciens	,	Bacillus velezensis	Raw honey (Polyfloral)	Romania	[40]	[48]
Gluconobacter oxydans	Honey (	Apis cerana indica	)	Tamil Nadu, India	[41]	[49]
Saccharomyces cerevisiae	strains,	Meyerozyma guilliermondiii	Raw honey (	Apis dorsata fabricius	)	Ratchaburi, Thailand	[42]	[50]