The Delphic bee: Bees and toxic honeys as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants

Herein a brief review, with 49 references, of the history and phytochemistry of toxic honeys, in which bees have sequestered plant secondary compounds naturally occurring in plant nectars (floral and extrafloral). It is hypothesized that such toxic honeys could have served as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants for human beings exploring novel ecosystems, causing such plants to stand out, even against a background of extreme biodiversity. After reviewing various ethnomedicinal uses of toxic honeys, the author suggests that pre-Columbian Yucatecan Mayans intentionally produced a psychoactive honey from the shamanic inebriant Turbina corymbosa as a visionary substrate for manufacture of their ritual metheglin, balché.