In 401 BC, Xenephon of Athens marched off to back the wrong contender in a Persian civil war and had to lead a retreat through hostile territory.  He wrote a best seller about it, the Anabasis.  One prominent adventure was not a battle, but the commandeering of a village from which their opponents had fled.

“Here, generally speaking, there was nothing to excite their wonderment, but the numbers of beehives here indeed astonishing, and so were certain properties of the honey.  The effect upon the soldiers who tasted the combs was, that they all went for the nonce quite off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, with a total inability to stand steady on their legs.  A small dose produced a condition not unlike a violent drunkenness; a large one an attack very like a fit of madness; and some dropped down, apparently at death’s door.  So they lay, hundreds of them, as if there had been a great defeat, a prey to cruelest despondency.  But the next day, none had died; and almost at the same hour of the day at which they had eaten they recovered their senses, and on the third of fourth day got on the legs again like convalescents after a sever course of medical treatment”.

The poison in the honeycombs that laid Xenephon’s soldiers low is known today as “mad honey”.  Tiny doses of it in milk or spirits are taken in the region around the Black Sea as a tonic—something to make one reflect on the elasticity of the term.  And the reason it’s toxic in larger amounts is the raw material.  Bees make it from the nectar of R. ponticum, the large pale-purple-flowered species native there.

Most recent cases of “mad honey disease” are known from the region and as far east as Nepal, and from Europe, where a rash of them was traced to souvenir honey from Turkey.  It’s still unusual because it’s rare that bees get only rhodie flowers to make honey from, so the poison is diluted enough to make it harmless.  Other rhodie and related species are known to contain the active ingredient, grayanotixin, formerly called andromedotoxin or rhodotoxin.  Our local native azalea and rhodie species, R. occidentale and R. macrophyllum contain it and so does Kalmia latifolia, the mountain laurel of the Appalachians.

You can still get a does if you’r dumb and determined enough to eat any part of a rhododendron.  I guess some merry soul might misguidedly festoon a salad with flowers, but the leaves are decidedly leathery and unpalatable (ed note— many species leaves are not leathery and might appear tasty).  The pollen and sap contain the toxin too—don’t sip the nectar.  And while I’m scolding: Don’t use the twigs to roast marshmallows and don’t make rhododendron tea, either.

Aside from that, the gastric effects, convulsions and paralysis don’t strike me as a pleasant way to get high, and the hallucinations some have experienced are described as uniformly unpleasant.

See you at the Pot Luck!