In the spring of 401 BCE, ten thousand Greek soldiers were retreating through the mountains above the Black Sea. They had lost a war they should not have been in, they were a long way from home, and they were hungry.
They found beehives. They ate.
Within hours the entire army was on the ground. Vomiting, disoriented, unable to stand. Xenophon, who was there and who wrote it down, described men lying about “like the aftermath of a defeat.” They recovered in a day or so and marched on.
That passage in the Anabasis is the oldest trip report in Western literature. Not a myth, not a fragment. A field officer's account of his own army being taken out by breakfast.
The chemistryWhat is actually happening
The compounds are grayanotoxins, and they do not come from the bee. They come from the flower.
Rhododendron ponticum and R. luteum grow thickly along the Black Sea coast, and they make grayanotoxins to discourage things from eating them. It is a defensive chemistry, aimed at insects and grazing animals. The bees are indifferent to it. They gather the nectar, process it, store it, and the toxin comes along for the ride.
So the jar on the shelf contains a molecule a plant invented to protect itself, carried into human hands by an insect that was unaffected by it, for reasons that have nothing to do with either of them.
That is the whole argument of this book in one sentence, and honey is where it is easiest to see.
Grayanotoxins bind to sodium channels. The dominant clinical effect is bradycardia — a dangerously slow heart rate — along with a drop in blood pressure. Worth being precise about that, because it is not a pleasant altered state with a side effect. The cardiac effect is the main event.
TurkeyDeli bal
The Turkish name is deli bal. Mad honey. It is still produced on the Black Sea coast, still sold, and still eaten in small quantities by people who believe it is good for blood pressure, arthritis and a range of other complaints.
It is also the reason the region has a steady trickle of hospital admissions from people who took a spoonful too many.
NepalThe cliff honey
The Himalayan version comes from Apis dorsata laboriosa, the largest honeybee in the world, which builds its combs on open cliff faces.
Harvesting it means what it sounds like it means. Gurung honey hunters climb handmade bamboo ladders on cliffs up to two hundred feet high, in smoke, surrounded by the largest bees on Earth, and cut the comb down by hand.
It is one of the most dangerous harvests of any substance in this book, and the practice is generations old.
Consider what happens next. That comb, cut off a Himalayan cliff by a man on a rope, arrives in a jar, by post, at an address in a country that regulates almost every other substance in these pages very heavily indeed.
The weapon67 BCE
Xenophon's ten thousand recovered. The Romans were not so lucky.
Roughly three centuries later, the Heptakometes left honeycombs in the path of Pompey's advancing troops. The soldiers ate. When they went down, the Heptakometes came back and killed around a thousand of them where they lay.
This is the clearest case in the book of a naturally occurring psychoactive used deliberately as a weapon. No laboratory, no refinement. Somebody worked out what the local honey did and left it lying in the road.
The honest part
Mad honey is legal essentially everywhere. You can order it online this afternoon.
That makes it the most accessible substance in this entire book and, on the medical evidence, one of the least advisable. The effect people are chasing sits very close to the dose that slows the heart to a crawl, the potency of any given jar is unknown and unregulated, and the compound was never designed to be interesting to humans. It was designed to make a caterpillar stop chewing.
Legal does not mean safe. It only means nobody has got around to it. That is worth holding on to, because the reverse is equally true, and this site has a whole page about how often those two ideas get confused.
