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.
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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