Dangling off of the edges of treacherous cliffs, Nepalese honey hunters spend their days collecting Himalayan honey. It might seem like they could just collect honey the normal way, but there’s a reason for this death-defying, dare-devil task: this honey is known to have mind-altering qualities.
Fact: People will do literally anything to gather natural products that trip you out.
The second video of National Geographic‘s Explorer series chronicled an average day in life of “The Last Honey Hunter” as he climbs up the sides of cliffs to harvest honey, more than 300 feet off the ground while being attacked by angry bees the whole time. You’d be angry too if someone was constantly sticking his greedy hands into your house and stealing your hard-earned honey.
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“We go there to get stung,” he tells the National Geographic crew. Plus, the Himalayan Honey Bee is the largest Honey Bee in the world and twice as big is the ones in the US (which still terrify American picnic goers every summer). This is all adding up to a seemingly terrible idea.
The honey itself will mess you up, big time. It’s full of a toxin that comes from the rhododendron flower. This is the reason it’s so sought after and sells on the black market for over $166 dollars per pound. It works like this: Gryanotoxins bind to sodium channels in your cells and are known to alter your mental state and give you some really trippy hallucinations.
But wait, there’s a catch. No mind-altering journey comes without a price. Eating this magical honey will also make you dizzy, nauseous, give you diarrhea, make you violently throw up and can even make you pass out. Long ago, soldiers tricked their enemies into ingesting it. Not a very fair way to fight, but it does the trick.
Why do people bother? There is one more positive side effect. The honey has been known to improve sexual performance. Ahhhhh, that’s the secret: People will literally risk a hive of bees to be good at sex!
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