Sweet but psycho(active): A brief history of mad honey

If (one day in the future when life returns to normal) you happen to be travelling near the Black Sea in Turkey or the eastern foothills of the Nepalese Himalayas, you might be interested in sampling a local sweet treat known as ‘mad honey’, for a trip within a trip.

What is mad honey?

Mad honey, called deli bal in Turkish, is almost magical in its properties. Just a small spoonful has the power to make you feel tingly, light-headed, euphoric and even trigger hallucinations. Too much, however, and the side effects include vomiting, diarrhea, loss of consciousness, seizures and, though rare, death. 

Mad honey hasn’t been spiked with magic mushrooms or LSD - it’s contaminated with grayanotoxins,a type of toxin found in rhododendron plants. 

Bees, collecting nectar and pollen from rhododendrons, accidentally pick up these toxins, which then make their way into the honey. There are only a handful of places in the world where rhododendron plants grow in large enough quantities for this to be a problem, notably Turkey and Nepal. 

A not-so-sweet history

Tales of mad honey reach all the way back to ancient Greece, perhaps even to the Oracle of Delphi. 

The Oracle, also known as the Pythia, spoke on behalf of the gods and was famed throughout the ancient Greek world for her predictions and divine prophecies. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (probably written down around 520 BCE), there’s a reference to three ‘bee oracles’ from Mount Parnassos at Delphi. These maidens could only prophesize after drinking meli chloron, or ‘green honey’, which may be an early reference to mad honey. 

The Oracle of Delphi probably high on honey.

One of the earliest accounts of mad honey comes from the Greek historian and philosopher Xenophon of Athens. In his chronicle The Anabasis, he wrote that a Greek army was travelling along the shores of the Black Sea in 401 BCE when they decided to feast on some local honey. A few hours later, they became disoriented and began vomiting and had diarrhea. By the next day, however, they were fine and travelled home to Greece. 

Mad honey makes another, more sinister, appearance when the Roman general Pompey the Great was pursuing the army of Mithridates VI, King of Pontus, in 97 BCE. (Pontus was an ancient kingdom by the Black Sea.) In an effort to outwit the Roman army, Mithridates ordered his troops to leave bowls of local mad honey in the path of the advancing enemy. When the soldiers came upon it, they ate it and succumbed to its effects, becoming delirious and fainting. The King of Pontus returned to swiftly slaughter them all. 

Saint Olga possibly thinking about murdering her enemies with honey.

A similar tactic was used by Empress Olga of Kiev in 946 CE, when she tricked her enemies into drinking a liquor made from honey. While we don’t know if the mead contained mad honey, sources say the drink sent 5000 men into a stupor, making it easy for her to annihilate the lot. Possibly due to this Christian act of kindness, she was later canonized as Saint Olga. 

It’s not all madness and massacre though. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Europeans imported mad honey to give their booze an extra kick, with the French calling it miel fou or ‘crazy honey’. In New Jersey, toxic honey was intentionally added to liquor during the eighteenth century to produce a drink that gave you an extra special buzz, though the grayanotoxins came from mountain laurel, rather than rhododendrons.

Mad honey has a slightly different use today. According to the Royal Society of Chemistry, ‘Mad honey is mostly used by middle-aged men for enhancing their sexual performance.’

So the next time you want to stop an army, start a party or simply increase your virility, mad honey might be just the thing for you.