This honey will make you hallucinate

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YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THIS HONEY WILL DO FOR YOUR SEX LIFE!

Can’t post in all caps so I’ll add a bit about TURKISH DOCTORS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!

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Sounds like maybe it should just read: This honey will poison you.

I accidentally (my bees did it on purpose – what were we thinking?) made a bunch of rhododendron honey in our rooftop hive in Portland, Oregon, where rhodies are a very common nectar source. The stuff tasted nasty.

Christian Raetsch wrote up a typically-superb summary of many varieties of psychoactive honey, available on Erowid

Say, we’re neighbors! So… you need to get rid of that honey? :wink:

Bees typically don’t feed on poisonous flowers they don’t like the taste as much as we. They’ll really only collect if there isn’t anything else available. So, this place in Turkey that only has this particular rhododendron would definitely limit that choice, and that the fact that it is also the species that has the highest concentration of the toxin.
So, unfortunately for the folks in Oregon, you’ll probably just have nasty honey :slight_smile:

As an amateur mead maker, my first thought here was “will the toxin survive fermentation?”, followed by “how much more poisonous is seizure mead going to be?”

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The illustration from this piece pairs nicely with the Lava Lamp story.

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I should have mentioned that this was a long time ago. It’s easy to make your own, though.

If it’s so easy to make your own honey why do people enslave bees to do it?

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Because the tears of the enslaved bees make the honey so much sweeter…

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Reminds me of the song “Rhododendron Honey” by Leslie Fish.
Cannot find it on Youtube, though.

This, honey, will make you hallucinate.

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This is a well known phenomenon. The earliest account I know of is Roman [edit: scratch that, apparently my memory of which classical culture this happened in was a bit beefed]. Here’s a link with a brief summary:

It’s been a long time since I read Xenophon’s Anabasis, but if I remember right his army was returning home through Turkey or somewhere near it, and a bunch of them got seriously ill on honey. http://www.classicreader.com/book/1803/29/

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