Who knew you could get drunk on honey?

Well, I suppose one could always drink a horn of mead; that's pretty much guaranteed to get you pissed.

But that doesn't really count as intoxication. That's more of a general drunk and disorderly feeling. The poison (the "toxic" in "intoxication") comes from the alcohol, the booze, the waste fermentation product of the yeast feasting on the honey in the mead. That hardly counts as honey intoxication.

Honey by itself is pretty noxious stuff — well, not really. One shouldn't give infants honey, as it contains botulism, and the botulism makes enough botox to overwhelm their small bodies. So don't do it. But for most people, the amount of botulism in honey is so small that the concentration of botox isn't high enough to do damage. And maybe it will reduce wrinkles? No, not really.

Sappho once wrote "neither the honey nor the bee for me." Perhaps she knew something of the bee's secret plot to take over the world with honey. Bees make honey from pollen. But if they happen to pick up pollen from a rhododendron (one of Sappho's favourite flowers, as it happens), then the honey turns from boon to bane.

This poisonous brand of nature's sweet serum was known to the Greeks. Pliny the Elder's The Natural History mentions it:

...there is another kind of honey, which, from the madness it produces, has received the name of "mainomenon".... What can we suppose to have possibly been the intention of Nature in thus laying these traps in our way, giving us honey that is poisonous in some years and good in others, poisonous in some parts of the combs and not in others, and that, too, the produce in all cases of the self-same bees?.... What, in fact, can have been her motive, except to render mankind a little more cautious and somewhat less greedy?

— Quoted from The Perseus Project's copy of The Natural History

The particular toxin involved in honey intoxication is called Grayanotoxin. The US FDA's Bad Bug Book says the toxin attacks the sodium channels in cell membranes, which I guess causes your cells to get angry and stage a minor revolt in response. That in turn causes some minor problems: drooling, nausea, vomiting, that sort of thing. In serious cases, the heart tends to slow down and beat irregularly. But despite that scary-sounding biochemical reaction, honey intoxication isn't very serious. It isn't even fatal in most cases, even without medical attention. What a downer. I guess bees won't be dominating the world any time soon.

Dedicated to the Queen Bee of Editors