Mad About Science: Mad Honey

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a food nut. Hunger and the avoidance of it is a driving force behind virtually every human behavior. We can consume a vast variety of food and have even turned its preparation into an art form. What happens when good food goes bad? What makes food bad? What makes bad food fun?

At the core of all food is bacteria, which exist in our gut and exert powerful influence over human health and even behavior — including as it relates to food. Bacteria present in food can become part of our microbiome and alter our overall health or even change our appetites and favorite foods. The interaction between our gut biome and the rest of our body is such a complicated and vast network that we still don’t completely understand the role it plays in our lives or exactly why it can do things like change our behaviors.

Nepali mad honey. Courtesy photo.

Bacteria and yeast can play another role in food as well, by creating byproducts or waste that can be helpful or harmful to our microbiome, blood, muscles and organs. An example of a good byproduct from yeast is carbon dioxide produced during fermentation of dough or beer. The yeast eats sugar and essentially burps out CO2, which creates air pockets in bread to make it light and fluffy and gives beer that fizzy head during a pour.

A bad example of a byproduct is mad honey.

Everyone loves honey, but not all honey is created equal. The bulk of honey found at the grocery store is clover honey. You’ve probably seen white clover popping up in your yard or in the field of your local playground; easily identified by the cone-shaped white flowers and three-leafed (rarely four or more) stems. 

Clover is short-lived and pulls double duty as a fodder and cover crop as well as the flower’s pollen being a food source for bees. The plant is easily grown and spreads rapidly, which makes it well suited for all of these purposes. Clover pollen grains become a mild and sweet honey after bees break it down and spit it back up — farmers can also pack so much of it into an area that they can easily control the outcome of the honey without fear of contamination from other plants.

Mad honey is not made from clover. This variant of honey is produced when bees have access to a large number of rhododendron plants. You’ve likely seen varieties of rhododendron around here with broad waxy leaves and large beautiful flowers that can be white, pink or red. Contained within the sweet-smelling pollen grains of this beautiful plant is something called grayanotoxin, a type of neurotoxin that once ingested can produce some pretty shocking effects in the human body.

You won’t get sick from sniffing these flowers, but when bees break down the pollen grains with honey-producing enzymes, the toxin is left behind and concentrated to create a thick red honey. The neurotoxin attacks the human nervous system and acts as a hallucinogenic substance similar to peyote — complete with extreme bouts of vomiting and diarrhea punctuating the psychedelic high.

The most interesting thing about mad honey is that it has been utilized as a biological weapon by militaries throughout history. Wild honey was commonly foraged by armies on the march and whole honeycombs were often pillaged from hives and stored at war camps. Honey’s low water content and high viscosity dampens the internal growth of bacteria, which allows it to remain stable for very long periods of time — even when left out in the open.

A common tactic utilized by Greek soldiers in antiquity was to identify and gather mad honey from hives, perform a tactical withdrawal from an encampment and allow their enemy to sweep in and feast on the harvested combs. 

The Romans learned of this tactic the hard way when they looted a Greek camp, began wildly hallucinating and fell into a state of incapacitation as they soiled themselves, only to be butchered by the Greek soldiers hours after the trap had been sprung.

Mad honey had other uses for the ancient Greeks, including as a recreational hallucinogenic (in smaller quantities) and likely as a medical treatment to alleviate constipation. Ancient Greek oracles were also believed to have regularly consumed mad honey in order to experience visions and predict the future. Even today, people in some areas of Turkey and Nepal continue to use mad honey both recreationally and medicinally. 

The effects of mad honey on the human body are sometimes unpredictable. Due to the organic nature of honey, it’s difficult to predict an exact dosage of grayanotoxins present in a given serving, and as such the severity of symptoms could vary wildly from dose to dose. 

In most cases, mad honey will cause a drop in blood pressure and a lower heart rate. This can compound the hallucinogenic effects by causing lightheadedness and dizziness. All of this is often linked to the impending nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, as the body tries to expel the toxins. In especially high doses muscle paralysis and seizures have occurred.

In antiquity, the effects of mad honey were understood to run their course over a period of three to four days, though this has been disputed recently. Depending on the dose, the effects and recovery of mad honey intoxication seem to be anywhere from 12 hours to a day or so.

Mad honey is often mixed with fermented milk in traditional medicines, but there have also been some instances in which the mad honey itself is fermented to create mead. It’s believed that adding mad honey to other alcoholic beverages will increase the potency of the alcohol. 

Before you rush to the grocery store to spice up your end-of-the-week beer, you should know that mad honey is extremely rare in the United States and seems to only be reliably produced in the Appalachian Mountains after particularly hard frosts — this is due to the hardy rhododendron flowers being the only food source for bees in that area.

Stay curious (and “Mad About Honey”), 7B.