Original photo by chrisdorney/ Shutterstock
The U.S. has more than 300 types of honey, but there’s one you won’t find among store shelves: mad honey. Upon visual inspection, mad honey offers up a clue that it’s a bit different. Created when bees feast almost exclusively on nectar and pollen from flowering rhododendron bushes, the natural sweetener often has a reddish hue. It also has a slightly bitter taste, though another unusual characteristic that appears shortly after consumption is what gives mad honey its name: It causes hallucinations.
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It's a factThe U.S. is home to around 4,000 types of bees, though the species we rely on for pollination and honey production isn’t native to the continent. English colonists likely brought the first honeybees to Virginia in 1622.
Mad honey is a rarity, found mostly among high-altitude honeycombs in the mountains of Turkey and Nepal. Harvesting it can be dangerous — Himalayan giant honeybees tend to create hives among cliffs and rugged outcrops — and consumption can be, too. Pollen and nectar from several species of rhododendrons in these areas contain grayanotoxins, a poison that helps the plants ward off hungry herbivores. While small doses of grayanotoxins can cause euphoria and lightheadedness in humans, larger doses can cause hallucinations, vomiting, temporary paralysis, and even death.
Those sometimes-disastrous reactions haven’t stopped humans from seeking out the sticky substance, though. Some practitioners of folk medicine have long believed that small doses of the toxin-laced honey can be beneficial for human healing. Microdoses of mad honey have been used to treat high blood pressure, diabetes, and arthritis — don’t try this at home — but researchers are unsure how beneficial the stuff is for anyone other than its original creators (bees).
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Mad honey has been used to slow advancing armies.
While today the word “honeytrap” brings to mind Cold War espionage and spy films, at one time in history, honey actually was used to bait and subdue enemy armies. The first known incident is preserved in writings by Xenophon of Athens, a military commander, historian, and student of the philosopher Socrates. According to Xenophon’s account, a Greek army he commanded in 401 BCE unknowingly consumed mad honey in northeast Turkey, becoming disoriented for days before the effects wore off. In 65 BCE, Mithridates VI of Pontus had combs containing mad honey purposely planted in the path of Roman soldiers to disable their defenses in battle. Even American soldiers have accidentally dined on tainted honey; according to Civil War lore, Union troops marching through the Appalachian mountains reportedly consumed mad honey, possibly made from local rhodies or mountain laurel plants, but with effects that were just as dizzying and disorienting.
Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.
