page_title: Honey
section_title: Toxic honey
hierarchical_section_title: Honey / Medical use and research / Health hazards / Toxic honey
caption_attribution_description: English: A honey bee collecting nectar from Alaskan monkshood (aconitum delphinifolium, or wolfsbane, or sometimes locally called "parrot's beak"), an extremely poisonous plant. This photo was taken at Stuckagain Heights trailhead, near the Campbell Creek gorge. The flowers close at night and open in the day, being the perfect shape to allow the bee to fit inside, into which it fit's its entire body to reach the nectar. (A little blurry, but best I could get as the bees pop in and out of the flowers very fast.)
context_page_description: Honey is a sweet, viscous food substance made by honey bees and some related insects. Bees produce honey from the sugary secretions of plants or from secretions of other insects, by regurgitation, enzymatic activity, and water evaporation. Bees store honey in wax structures called honeycombs. The variety of honey produced by honey bees is the best-known, due to its worldwide commercial production and human consumption. Honey is collected from wild bee colonies, or from hives of domesticated bees, a practice known as beekeeping or apiculture.
  Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructose and glucose, and has about the same relative sweetness as sucrose. It has attractive chemical properties for baking and a distinctive flavor when used as a sweetener. Most microorganisms do not grow in honey, so sealed honey does not spoil, even after thousands of years.
  Fifteen millilitres of honey provides around 190 kilojoules of food energy.
  Honey use and production have a long and varied history as an ancient activity. Several cave paintings in Cuevas de la Araña in Spain depict humans foraging for honey at least 8,000 years ago.
context_section_description: Mad honey intoxication is a result of eating honey containing grayanotoxins. Honey produced from flowers of rhododendrons, mountain laurels, sheep laurel, and azaleas may cause honey intoxication. Symptoms include dizziness, weakness, excessive perspiration, nausea, and vomiting. Less commonly, low blood pressure, shock, heart rhythm irregularities, and convulsions may occur, with rare cases resulting in death. Honey intoxication is more likely when using "natural" unprocessed honey and honey from farmers who may have a small number of hives. Commercial processing, with pooling of honey from numerous sources, is thought to dilute any toxins.
  Toxic honey may also result when bees are proximate to tutu bushes (Coriaria arborea) and the vine hopper insect (Scolypopa australis). Both are found throughout New Zealand. Bees gather honeydew produced by the vine hopper insects feeding on the tutu plant. This introduces the poison tutin into honey. Only a few areas in New Zealand (the Coromandel Peninsula, Eastern Bay of Plenty and the Marlborough Sounds) frequently produce toxic honey. Symptoms of tutin poisoning include vomiting, delirium, giddiness, increased excitability, stupor, coma, and violent convulsions. To reduce the risk of tutin poisoning, humans should not eat honey taken from feral hives in the risk areas of New Zealand. Since December 2001, New Zealand beekeepers have been required to reduce the risk of producing toxic honey by closely monitoring tutu, vine hopper, and foraging conditions within 3 km (2 mi) of their apiary. Intoxication is rarely dangerous.
caption: A honey bee collecting nectar from monkshood (Aconitum delphinifolium, or "wolf's bane"), an extremely toxic plant: The flowers are shaped in such a way that the bee must fit its entire body into the flower to reach the nectar.
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