(via Creating a buzz: Turkish beekeepers risk life and limb to make mad honey | World news | The Guardian)

It is no surprise that a substance powerful enough to take out 1,000 battle-hardened mercenaries of the Roman republic has been the subject of fascination for millennia. Stories cataloguing the delights and the dangers of deli bal, or Turkish “mad honey”, crop up throughout history.

Pompey the Great was admired and feared throughout the ancient world, but an early misadventure with mad honey near the modern-day Black Sea city of Trabzon almost derailed his entire career.

The Roman general was pursuing the army of Mithridates VI in 97BC when in a stroke of military genius the Greco-Persian king ordered his troops to place bowls of the locally produced honey in the path of the advancing Romans. Three detachments of soldiers fell upon it, becoming delirious or fainting as they succumbed to its psychedelic effects. Mithridates’ troops returned to find Pompey’s men incapacitated and proceeded to slaughter the lot of them.

Mad honey is still produced in small quantities by beekeepers in the Kaçkar mountains above the Black Sea, the only place in the world other than the foothills of the Himalayas where indigenous species of rhododendrons produce a potent neurotoxin called grayanotoxin. If bees feed on enough rhododendron nectar, the mud-red honey they produce has a sharp scent, bitter taste – and for human consumers, a potential high.

A small spoonful on its own or with hot water or boiled milk is enough to induce a mildly hallucinogenic or euphoric state. It is normally taken before breakfast as a traditional treatment for hypertension, impotence and a number of other conditions.

Eighteenth-century Europeans called it miel fou, importing it from the Ottomans to add to ale for an extra buzz. More recent versions of mad honey have popped up in western popular culture in Matt Groening’s Futurama and the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes.

Too much, however, can reduce blood pressure to potentially dangerous levels and induce nausea, fainting, seizures, arrhythmia and in rare cases, death. Dozens of people a year are admitted to hospital in Turkey for mad honey poisoning.  …