Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Honey

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why honey is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Honey known for being sweet. Famous for being made by bees, specifically honeybees, if you heard last week. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why honey is secretly incredibly fascinating. There folks, hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Yes.

What is your relationship to or opinion of honey? Honey. Yeah, I like it. I found out, I learned when I was very young, somehow the factoid that it's a bee vomit came, came to me somehow. And it freaked me out for a while. And I was grossed out. I didn't want to eat it. And then I watched an actual sort of nature documentary showing how the

bees make it. And then I wasn't gross dad anymore. I was like, ah, like not that kind of gross vomit. Just like bees stuff. And so I ate it again. To me it's a spitting anyway. I know like some stomach stuff is involved, but it's a spitting basically. It's fine.

Yeah. I mean, they're basically little machines, little honey machines. And I used to I loved Winnie the Pooh when I was a kid. I would always ask my mom if I could. have like a little tiny jar of honey when I was watching Winnie the Pooh because he always made the honey look so good except that it was like kind of yellowy and opaque in Winnie the Pooh which

always confused me because that's not what it looks like in real life. That's true. Pop culture really likes to make it look so solid. Well, it's because it's hard to animate translucent. True. Like hand-drawn animation. But, yeah, I mean, they could go to a little more trouble there, making it accurate. And what a Winnie the Pooh fan?

Just holding your little, like, it's like wearing a sports team's shirt or something. Like, let's go Winnie. Let's go Winnie. That's very cute. Yeah. And I like honey too. I don't think about it a ton. And also, when I visited Asheville, North Carolina, there's a wonderful store that especially has sourwood honey in the summer.

So that's probably the best honey I've ever had. And we'll talk in the whole bonus show is about honey tips and share yours on Discord if you want. But like great honey you can get or weird honey. That's the whole bonus show. Yeah. And it's wild too because we both have a small little hemunculi. And you're not you're not supposed to feed the homoculi honey, which is like, and then when you find out why it's like it's wild.

I'm sure we'll mention that. Yeah, basically possible infant potulism. But it was surprising how, like, it should be a section of the baby book, but it was kind of a whole section of multiple baby books we read is just don't give your baby honey. Yeah. And like, that's it. Yeah. I don't want to do call out of anyone specific, but I saw on the X, the Everything app, someone like bragging about giving their kid raw honey, like baby, baby child raw honey. And saying like, it's natural.

And it's like, yeah, I mean, you know, botulism is actually natural. It's quite natural. Yeah, it's very natural. Lions is natural. Right, right. Fall off cliff is natural. Wiley coyote is unnatural. Yeah.

Yeah. Gravity is very natural and also an endometa babies. Yeah. That has come up for us as new parents is, yeah, it's a specific thing. you got to avoid. But as long as you're above, apparently around the age of one. Yes. Honey's pretty good. So you listeners are fine. Like if you eat honey and you get, if there's a little bit of the botulinum in the honey,

it's actually like our adult immune systems just deal with it. It's fine. But for a baby who's got a brand new immune system that has to learn everything, it's just not strong enough to be able to deal with it. Yeah. And that was all we were going to say about it. Cool. We did it. Yay. Yeah. Yeah. Roll. Roll credits. And with Honey, thank you to a few folks on the Discord for suggesting this, in particular, Killian and also Kaanashi. Thank you both.

And I hope folks enjoyed the Bees episode last week. And we haven't heard your response to it yet. But I'll check it out. And thank you for listening to this one. A low humming, a buzzing in the distance. Yeah. Yeah. There's just both such cool topics.

So I love that we can do a whole show about Honey. And every episode we lead with a quick set of. fascinating numbers and statistics this week that's in a segment called stessa stasis stessa says so says so so so that's such so so that's such such such such such such such such such such such such such such such so it's a heat wave and Alex is uh doing this I just want people to appreciate thank you and also thank you to syntax on the discord for suggesting this And they specifically said this is probably impossible when they suggested flight of the bumblebee, but the word stats. So they're right.

That's great. Doesn't know Alex. Doesn't know Alex's commitment to the bit. And we have a new day for this every week. Please make them as silly and whack and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to sit pot at gmail.com. And the first number of about honey is 71 years. 71 years is how long it took scientists to determine that the residue in an ancient Greek jar.

was some ancient honey from thousands of years ago. Ancient honey. Yeah, I love this. I love this so much. Yeah. Yeah, popular science says that archaeologists were digging at a Greek shrine in 1954, found this jar, and then it took 71 years of analyses and arguments. In 2025, people published a pretty definitive analysis of the sugars and the proteins

and the structure of what's in it and affirmed that, yes, it's honey in the jar rather than other animal or vegetable stuff. Yeah, it's incredible that something can last that long and not decay. Yeah, yeah, this residue is put in a jar around 520 BC, so it's 2,500-year-old honey. Wow. And it's also not the oldest we've found. Apparently the oldest the number is around 5,500 years ago. Whoa.

In what's now the West Asian country of Georgia. they found some honey from 3,500 BC. That's wild. But so did anyone taste it? Yeah, so if the jars open, you shouldn't. Oh, okay. But archaeologists apparently get a huge kick out of telling people that if a properly sealed jar of honey is found, you can basically still eat it no matter when it's from.

Okay. I can imagine like Winnie the Pooh is still going to eat. that dangerous tomb honey regardless of what you tell that irasca will yellow fella yeah oh now i'm imagining like winnie the pharaoh oh that's great oh cool inter me with piglet tiggers going up and down the pyramid like oh oh oh it's really fun for him yeah and especially egyptian sites they have found jars of honey and archaeologists seem to get a kick out of saying, and you could eat this. Because if it's properly sealed, honey pretty much doesn't have an expiration date despite being natural and despite that seeming wild.

Yeah, because it does seem wild. Yeah, and it turns out several factors come together for that. Honey is extremely low in moisture. So there's no moisture for things to consume that would feed on and ferment. in the honey. Its pH is highly acidic. And then with modern processing, we tend to process out anything but the honey. Like we'll take out other particles of pollen or even enzymes. But before that processing, we sealed it in containers that prevented things from going in and feeding on those particulates. And then the other, other reason we can keep microbes and things out of it is that

one thing in honey is hydrogen peroxide. Oh, whoa. Yeah, the stuff you sterilize a cut with that you don't want to drink is in honey. Yeah, if you drink it, you're going to blow chunks is the problem. Yeah. I have used hydrogen peroxide. Actually, it's really good if, okay, this is kind of sound a little suspicious, but I promise you. For innocent reasons, if there's blood on something, like if you want to get blood stains out of things, you use hydrogen peroxide.

You know, like if you say have a dinner party and for some reason a guest turns up dead and you've got like a butler and an heiress and so on there, you want to get the stain out of like the rug, the Persian rug that you have in the sitting room next to the pipe and the candlestick. hydrogen peroxide is really good at getting that stain out. All of the paintings in Katie's home have moving eyes. Yeah. All of them. It's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a totally normal and useful chemical. And we mentioned the gist last week on how bees make honey. And we mentioned at the top of this, it's a lot of spitting and essentially vomiting the nectar of plants between the mouth. of honey bees. But like when they first gather the nectar, it's almost mostly water. Anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of a plant's nectar is water. And then honeybees dry that out, some with flapping their wings, but mostly just spitting it from mouth to mouth to mouth to mouth to mouth. And the enzymes in their mouth also do some reactions with it. And that's also some stomach acid doing things.

And one enzyme in bees' stomachs is called glucose oxidase. And when glucose oxidase reacts with nectar, it dries it out a lot and also adds to byproducts of gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. Hmm. And so what is the, for the bees purposes, is it so they can store it for long periods of time or there's some other reason for it to be so dried out? It's mostly storage, yeah, because then you can put a lot of sugar in a small space. There's not so much water patting it out. Right. Do you know, that's why,

that's why for a beehive, why they have those hexagonal shapes for a beehive, it's just the most efficient space for those little holes structurally. They don't actually construct the hexagon. They just, they make like, they drill a hole, but then all the simultaneous hole burrowing smushed together makes them all turn into hexagons. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. They're just doing an amazing job of putting stuff together.

And then they just, it's like in each of those little shelving units, they store the highly concentrated, very nutritious honey. Yeah. And apparently also they make wax from glands in their bodies. And the spark of that is to eat a little bit of honey. And then as they eat some honey, eight glands on their abdominal section, put out beeswax. I had always heard the name beeswax and never really thought about it. And it turns out it as a byproduct of the meeting honey. And then they build their own home out of it.

Yeah. To store more honey. So honey bees are all about the honey. Have you ever had honeycomb, like straight up honeycomb? Yeah, I've had a little bit of it. I don't like it that much. Oh, really? I enjoy it.

But like any food that can make me feel like I'm a bear, that's like an instant. It's an instant hack for me. me to like I think my parents must have like taught this to me because like any kind of food that I'm like a little skeptical of if it's like imagine you're a bear eating this then I'm like oh yeah'm yum yum yum yum like that's how I got myself to eat sushi for the first time was like oh I don't know about this raw fish and then it was like oh but bears eat raw salmon rom yum yum yum yum um uh I don't know about this honeycomb it's kind of weird what if it has bee parts in it oh what that bad to a bear?

No. Ramam, mom, mom. So that's, um, if like, if you ever are a picky eater, that's my advice. Just imagine you're a bear eating stuff. I needed this advice so much sooner. Oh, I'm sorry, buddy. I guess when I was a kid, one of my big, big heroes was more like, you know, Thomas the tank engine or something.

So I should have pretended everything as coal, you know? Eating coal. Yeah. Sit all over your face. Thomas would tune all over the island with this And I'd like fuel myself with Yeah Things

I love I love Thomas too by the way He's the best yeah Dude the the cask of a Monteado one where they shut that train in Brick them up into the tunnel is a nightmare God Our our shopping mall When I was probably in like middle school added a Thomas the Tank Engine store Like just Thomas Tank Engine stuff

And more than once I asked the staff if they would have some older kids sized clothes at some point. Dude, I, no joke. If they have a cool Thomas Tank Engine shirt for adults, I'd wear it. Come on. It's Thomas, man. Everyone would wear that shirt where it says, I'm a very useful engine. Like, that's fun. That's a fun thing to wear.

He's classy is what he is. Yeah. In our house, we're very pro-trained, so we're going to try to indoctrinate a little baby G to like trains. Pro-trained propaganda. And pro-bear propaganda, pro-B propaganda. There we go, yeah. We have a number here about bears on Tani, actually, at least in culture. The number is 1957.

The year 1957 is when two couples had a dinner party and came up with honey and bear-shaped bottles. Oh, gosh, bless them. I can say God bless them. I'm sorry. I'm trying to censor myself more because of the baby. So gosh, bless them. That's great. Yeah.

This mental floss says that it was a married couple named Ralph and Luella Gambur. The gambers were the founders. of the Dutch gold brand of honey, which is still going. But in 1957, that was like a tiny hobby farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It had been going for a decade. It was not a big deal at all. And then they had a couple over for dinner. The conversation kind of wandered into the honey business.

And quote, while brainstorming ideas for novelty honey containers, the group landed on the idea of a honey bear, as Ralph Gamber put it, quote, we just figured a bear likes honey. Why not a bear of honey? End quote. I mean, of course. Geniuses. It's just a really good idea. No, it's a really good idea.

Yeah. And then the other thing here is Winnie the Pooh. Because Dutch Gold starts putting their honey in bear-shaped bottles. Sales explode. They become a national brand to this day. But the thing is, they were concerned about getting sued. Because one year earlier, the creator of Winnie the Pooh. who A.A. Milne had passed away. The gambers were worried, like Milne's estate would now be hunting

anybody who made even vaguely Winnie the Poohish products. And so the gambers did bear bottles without ever, like, copyright trademark controlling that. And so that's why a bunch of companies do it, and it's a trope now. Wow. But did they still, like, live comfortably? Like, please don't tell me they died in a gutter because... No, no. Yeah, Dutch gold is a huge brand. still. It's just that everybody else can do that too because they said, I guess, like, this made us popular and we can't necessarily control it because we'll get sued about Winnie the Pooh. Also, like, it is an idea that should belong to the world, just like insulin. I agree, yeah.

Yeah, and they also got a little lucky because, I guess, five years earlier, a different honeymaker tried and failed to patent a bear-shaped honey bottle. But that guy's problem seems to be that he was trying to patent a whole bunch of bottles shaped like a whole bunch of animals all at once. And the office was like you can't just patent the concept of a bottle that looks like any animal out earth with stupid. But also what other animal except for a bee would be associated with honey? It seems like they just wanted to put their fingers on, like call fives on every idea, you know? Because it doesn't make sense. Right. Throwing everything at the hive and see what sticks.

Yeah. But like there, I have seen hive, beehives shaped bottles, like the classic like concentric, smaller tubular circles, shaped beehive, which by the way, I've literally never seen a beehive that looks like that, just that shape, you know? Never. We have that bottle in our house right now. And yeah, it's not real at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But so that's why and where the bear bottle comes from. And yeah, if folks heard the recent stuff about brown bears, that also fits this. And apparently... Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a yellow duck. Sorry, I'm sorry. It starts with a redbird, but it's fine. Oh, well, you know, wow.

I'm actually impressed by that. I guess how many times I've read that book this week? It is Baby Schmidt's favorite. Well, Alex, do you have voices for all the animals? Alex? What I do is I keep it kind of a consistent performance for each one, and he likes the repetition. So they're actually all kind of matching, yeah. I've got voices for each one, and I have to do the same voices every time.

Oh, well, that's its own repetition. We're doing great. We're so good at this. We're rocking it. That's rocks? Yeah, so, yeah, apparently most bears, including brown bears, like to eat. the entire hive. The sugary honey, the protein-packed insects. M-nom, yum, yum, yum, yum.

Everything, yeah. Yeah. So they're like Katie's concept. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. If you've ever, in L.A., I think there's an ice cream shop you can go to the, I forgot what it's called, but it's like you can get like the honeycomb with the ice cream. It's really good. That's how I've eaten honeycomb, and I didn't like it that much. Yeah. Well, you just don't got enough of that bear in you. I really don't. More of a little bison. But yeah, and the last number is 2021.

That's when there was a new study of how honeybees build their hives, specifically in terms of the shapes. And it turns out they mostly do that famous hexagon shape and are also able to do anything from as few as four-sided shapes to as big as nine-sided shapes, depending on what exactly fits the structure of the structure of the hive together. So this was teams from Auburn University and Cornell University.

They used image recognition software and tiny cameras and found that there tended to be like big stripes of areas in a hive where stuff got joined together. And even then up to 93% of the odd shapes were either five or seven-sided. Bees are really focused on that ideal six-sided shape for putting the honey in. And then they seal it with a cat. cap of beeswax and it's as good as a human gyre it keeps it for a long time. It's so amazing.

And they kind of like have different little recipes for like there's different types of honey in the hive with different nutritional content. And then the sort of fanciest the the top shelf honey is royal jelly which they will feed to like when

they when there's a pheromone imbalance and they detect that there needs to a new queen, maybe the old queen has died or something, they will produce and feed the royal jelly to a new larva. Yeah. And we'll talk a little more about that and another takeaway, too. But before that, we have a takeaway that gets us kind of beyond bees to still talk about honey. Because takeaway number one, an amazing ant species makes some of the most antimicrobial honey

on earth and stores it in specialized worker butts. Oh, is this, wait, this isn't Manuka Honey, is it? This is the Honeypot ants. Oh, yeah, these guys. Oh, they're so, they're wild to look at. Yeah. And you can actually, have you seen these photos? Like, if you actually give them sugar water of a, like you dye the sugar water

with different colors, you can make multicolored little ants that look like little jewels. It's wild. I have not seen that. Looking it up later, linking it. It's incredible. All right. Go, Alex. Talk about these ants. I love that this honey topic, it is real that honey bees,

and folks heard the bee episode last week, it's specifically honey bees. But this is really strongly associated with honey bees. Bees are essential to the honey topic and one species of Australian ants in a kind of separate evolutionary way,

figured out a way to make what they call true honey. It's actually honey in the ways that be honey as honey. But they don't really store it in a hive instead of cells of a hive, those hexagons. There's an entire class of workers in the ant hive, the ant hill that is created to store honey and they're like ballooning, expanding butt sections of their bodies. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's like you can see it. They're like little, when they're deflated, they look like normal ants when they're, when they've got enough of that honey in them, they look like little, just sort of like translucent water balloons full of honey. Yeah, it's, we'll have pictures in the Instagram carousel. It's so wild. And the one recent study of it in 20203,

microbiologists at the University of Sydney wanted to find out how good this stuff. is at killing microbes, but that also got them into the way it's made in general, because like bee honey, these ants are making it by spitting it between each other's mouths. But the beginning is some aphids. There are shrub-like trees called mulga trees, and then aphids live on those. The ants stroke the aphids with their antennae, and then that makes the Afids excrete what's called honey-dew from their bums. Honey-dew is a plant nectar-based substance that is not considered true honey. It's just different.

It hasn't had the processing. And it's not poop. I know it sounds like it's poop because it's coming from a butt, but apparently other things come out of a butt, especially if you're an insect. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, like it's what, because it's not just these species of ants there are, I think, multiple species of ants that will farm aphids. like they are cattle.

It's pretty amazing. Yes, it's so weird. And I'm also noticing I use the word bums. That's because I am reading quotes from Australian scientists who talk to the journal science. I don't say bums. That's not my deal. Iphid bums. They sell ifid bums.

But yeah, the stroking of the aphids causes them to excrete excess honeydew. The honeypot ants drink that. that. And then the ants that drink that are not the ones that store it in the end. They transfer it mouth by mouth eventually to a special class of workers who hang from the ceilings of the ant nests. And then the golden sort of nectar balloons in their abdomens apparently reaches about the size of a grape. And then that is a way of eventually generating what we consider true honey because the mouth and stomach enzymes were involved. Yeah, it's wild. There's different roles that these ants take on and the storage ants. Their whole thing is just like, I eat a lot. And then if somebody wants some,

I spit it up for them. Yes. Yeah, they regurgitate it when the colony doesn't have enough food or when they just want to be eating that. Yeah, because like they're literally just like little Ziploc baggies of this processed honeydew. It's very Mad Max blood bags. Yeah. And then this 2023 study, they found that not only does this process create peroxides, like the hydrogen peroxide and bee honey, but also it might spread a antimicrobial peptide that is unique to these honey pot ants. And so it might be an even more powerful disinfectant as a honey. And apparently Australian First Nations people have done that. like use the honey pot ant honey on wounds and dressings and so on in the past.

Yeah, no, that's, I think in general, it's like different varieties of honey can be used as sort of an anti-microbial treatment. Yeah, it really works that way. And it makes sense chemically. In modern times, given that we have other stuff, I wouldn't necessarily just squirt some of the bare honey out onto an open wound. Yeah. But in the past, like when you didn't have any better options, I had mentioned this because I sort of, I got it confused. But yeah, manuka honey is a type of honey that I think that one's actually produced by bees. And it's from a specific bees that use a specific tree flower nectar.

And that one also has some kind of, like I don't think it's actually very good to eat, but it does have antimicrobial properties. But again, I don't know that that's going to be any more effective than, say, like, you know, actual, like neosporne or something like that. That's exactly right. And I love that this ties into the bees episode we did last week where we talked about wasps and bees and ants all being closely related. That allowed for both this weird honeybee branch that truly is weird in insect evolution and then separately the honey pot ant that found a whole different way of doing this. Yeah, it's so wild. And getting into yet another insect, weirdly, we also have takeaway number two. Spotted lantern flies are making a demonic fake version of honey in Philadelphia.

Oh, God. Yeah, these guys are, these are the Smosh on site guys, ain't they? They are. Yeah, and in the U.S., especially, they're considered an invasive species. and we are encouraged to squash them and destroy them if we see them. I've done it. I've stepped on them. Yeah, me too.

I feel bad about it because, like, I don't, I think it's important not to hate invasive species on sort of a, they're not ontologically evil. They're just, you know, damage through no fault of their own, the sort of local ecosystem. And so, you know, I like, I do stomp them when I see them. but I feel bad about it, which is, you know, like the way to go about it. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty much the best we can do as people. I've seen a lot of people post memes from like the movie Starship Troopers about fighting bugs. It feels like one of those. It's kind of uncomfortable.

But I like bugs in general. It's just these guys, unfortunately, yeah, they can't be there. Yeah, yeah. Before people tell me, I know Starship Troopers is like a satirical thing about fascism. I'm not saying you're a fascist if you squash spotted lantern flies. Yeah, I mean, it depends. Are you like goose stepping on the lantern flies? Then you might be a fascist. My physical therapist told me to goose step. Come on. But key sources here are NPR, a report by Scott Detrow. And then also a piece for Atlas Obscira. This started around 2019 with a honey brand owner named Don Shump. And this is not technically honey, it's what's called honey-dew. This guy, Don Shump, noticed around the fall of 2019 that his team was processing the local honey harvest and it had a really strange aroma.

He says it smelled like maple bacon and also had a deep reddish-brown color and did not match the usual. seasonal honey of the plants and bees in Philadelphia. For some reason that makes me like really uncomfortable. Yeah, and they've leaned into it. They've ended up generating a product that they called doom bloom honey. And again, it's not technically honey, but it is driven by especially the droppings and the but honey do of spotted lantern flies influencing the plants and the bees of the region. Right, so you can eat this?

Yeah, you can eat it and it's okay. It's sold by commercial people and it's all right. This sounds like one of those products that you say like, it's all right, you can eat this. And then you just start getting everyone's haunted. You know, dead pets coming up from the cemetery, children acting strange. It really does feel that way. Here's the other horror bit, NPR talk to Mar. Marina Marchese, who's the founder of a group called the American Honey Tasting Society.

She's a honey sommelier. God, I'm in the wrong career. I know. You'd be so good. I got to go, Alex. I've found my calling. And they asked her, like, hey, is this spotted lanternfly jar of honeydew going to be a thing? And she says, quote, I think it's a new variety of honey.

I believe that it's here to stay. And with a little bit of education, I think beekeepers will start to embrace it. Because, you know, people are into all sorts of flavors in the world. Our bonus show is all about amazing honey as you can try. And so this is an extremely weird thing that is apparently specific to southeast Pennsylvania where there's huge populations of spotted lantern flies. So also they're really infested with spotted lantern flies in Philadelphia.

But that and then the plants and the bees and how that interacts, you get this extremely smoky, dark-looking honey. I mean, technically, like, honeybees are invasive in the U.S. So you've got, like, two invasive species making demonic honey. Right, our honeybees are European. Yeah. Yeah. They're always taking lunch breaks for way too long. Also, if you go around stepping on honeybees in your community, people will not be excited about it.

Don't try to justify it with this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, but it is interesting because we love honeybees, right? They are, you know, beloved. And then we hate the spotted lantern flies. And I mean, I think obviously we have a better sense of the impact that honeybees have on the environment, which is like not terrible, but not always great because they can out-compete local species. But we don't know what the lanternflies will do.

So I think there's more of this like, oh, we better nip this in the bud because it could be a lot worse. Yeah. Yeah, it really still makes sense to probably stop letting spotted lanternflies do whatever they want. Squush them and squoosh them.

Which means squishing them. I can't negotiate with them. So, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, people are making a weird, like black-looking honeydew out of their, you know, but releases.

in Philadelphia specifically. So if you want to go there, have that, you know, check it out. Come in spiritual piglet. Really? Now I want to listen to our Pentagrams episode again. Oh, it would fit. I require an old rabbit and a young rabbit. Or a kangaroo.

Either way. Kanga and Roo, right? Those are characters. Kanga, yeah, Kanga and Rue, there's, uh, do, Do you want me to go through all the Winnie the Poop characters, Alex? Sort of. I know you can. Winnie the poop.

Piglet, Tigger, owl, rabbit, Kanga, and Rue, Christopher Robin. Yay. We did it. Thomas, James, George, Mr. Topham hat. Sometimes George Carlin, sometimes Ringo Star. There's more. Anyway, that focuses on a ton of numbers and takeaways. We're going to take a short break, then explore some of the strange.

just elements of honey bee honey production in a few senses of the word element. We are back and we have a couple more honey takeaways for you. The next one is takeaway number three. According to recent scientific discoveries, honey has minor benefits for human health because it has huge benefits for bee health. Apparently, like, until the last few decades, some scientists thought honey is basically sugar water with most of the water taken out. Water.

I need to go water. I've been that guy. It's all the different. Yeah. It's from men in black, of course. But yeah, it turns out it is borderline medication for bees on top of being sustenance. And our human bodies are basically too big for it to help us. But maybe there's some nice microbiome gut stuff.

So we shrink ourselves down to bee size. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There you go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because then apparently the downside is some people have run with it and said, like, oh, honey is a superfood that makes humans invincible. And that's not really true. But there's more to it than just sugar and water.

Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, like, this is what I tell myself when I use honey instead of sugar. I know what you just said where it's like we're too big for it to really make a huge difference. But I'm ignoring that. Just straight up. I do that with chocolate, even though we made a whole chocolate episode.

Yeah. No, no. I mean, dark chocolate. It's good for you, man. That's basically medicine. Yeah, I will never die. Yeah. Right.

I'll never die because I'm eating dark chocolate and honey. Yeah. And key sources here are a feature for Knowable magazine by NPR science writer Burley McCoy. And then a feature for The Guardian by assistant science editor Donna Liu. Starting with the human side, honey is maybe a little bit good for you beyond just the calories and the sugar. That's good enough. for me. Let me, I'm gonna, I'm gonna shotgun a bear right now.

Like not, that sounds bad. I mean a plastic bear. I'm gonna squirt the plastic bear hunting into my mouth. Well, I really walked you into saying shotgun a bear. It made sense until we thought about it. Yeah. I, you know, shameful secret when I used to play Oregon Trail as a kid, I would, I would kill all the bears because they were big and it was like I'd get a huge amount.

on a meat. In fact, I'd get so much meat that I'd end up killing my entire party because we were carrying too much bear meat around and to the exclusion of everything else. So apparently that wasn't the way to get to Oregon. Yeah, I mean, they let me propose the bison emoji despite my Oregon Trail actions. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's tough. Yeah. It's a bad thing. and historical. One scientist working on the nutrition of honey is entomologist May Barrenbaum of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne. And she says just a few decades ago, quote, even beekeepers and certainly bee scientists

considered honey nothing more than sugar water, end quote. But recent studies show us that honey has enzymes, vitamins, minerals, organic molecules. One downside is like we said, you can't give it to an infant because their tiny body might let the wrong spores end their life. Don't do that. But for the rest of us with bigger bodies, it seems to have a small, positive impact on our gut health and the overall diversity of our diet. It's not so much that honey does not contain the same kind of sugar that's like not good

for you, but it also contains other stuff. But is it in like, is it in like processed honey or is this only something that you can get in like raw honey? Apparently you might get less of it from processed honey, but still some of it. I see. So raw honey is not some kind of giant win either. Is raw honey more dangerous for adults in any way? Or is the only danger that you might get like a bee leg in there?

It seems like raw honey on like something like raw milk is not particularly dangerous for adults. That was my understanding. I'm going to be real with you. I don't really care if someone puts. some version of honey in front of me, I'll just eat it. But I have had raw honey because from what I understood, it's not like, it's not dangerous. It's been just like on the shelf in the grocery store. And I have sort of a stupid and unquestioning trust in whatever's on the shelf and like, say, or Ralph's. And I assume it's safe for me. It's probably a bad touristic. But yeah.

It's a good question to ask in the United States of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And it seems like it's fine despite guys like him running around. Yeah. And like we say with any of this stuff, we're not doctors and we're doing our best and be careful, you know. And oddly, the most processing will go into honey for a separate purpose of dressing wounds. Apparently there's what's called medical grade honey where it's sterilized with radiation. So then you can use it to dress wounds and have a truly sanitary barrier against infectious stuff getting in. So it's sterilized with.

with radiation, but it's not radioactive itself or at such a low level that it's not a problem? It is not radioactive itself. It's sterilized with radiation. And our last takeaway is about a different radioactive honey thing. Oh, fun. But yeah, and then the last thing here, there's those tiny medical benefits maybe to humans because it turns out honey has huge medical benefits for the bees making it and eating it. Researchers have been looking at the ways bees consume honey, and we think it gives bees major protection against microbial pathogens, toxins, also stress from cold weather.

It might help them regulate their bodies' development and extend their lifespans. And there was one study where they gathered a population of sick bees. I couldn't find exactly what was wrong with them, but... Criminally insane bees. And apparently when bees were offered different varieties of honey and they had an illness, they chose specific honey to consume that best fought the illness. At a bees body level and also the bees are the ones making it, it's apparently hugely important to their health in really cool ways that we're still figuring out. Right. Cool.

Yeah. in close communal situation with other bees. And that's one thing that can happen to any species that lives in like a society or in close quarters is you can have the spread of disease. And so having some kind of ability to cope with the spread of pathogens is really important when you're like a community-based organism. Totally. And that also gets to send a takeaway number. four. Honey is such crucial food and medicine for honeybees. They will overthrow and depose a queen if they are not productive enough. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Dad with the bee monarchy. Yeah. And we we call them queens as humans in a way that is probably confusing because they are not decision-making

rulers. But apparently honeybees will use chemicals and pheromones to indicate to each other that the queen is either sick or unproductive and needs to be replaced and overthrown. Right. So the queen is, she produces pheribones and she is the one, like, she's the only one in the colony who can breed and create offspring, generally speaking. And so like the problem is if like if something's wrong with the queen, like, it's, like, it's, It's not like the whole colony is just there to serve the queen. The colony is there to propagate itself. And there's some genetic shenanigans for why it's in the interest of the sort of sister,

all the sister bees that has to do with their haploid diploid genes. It's, you know, if you look up, because this is kind of a separate conversation, but if you look up haploid diploid, you'll get sort of a much better explanation than I could probably give for why bees are, it's in their interest to like have the queen produce a lot of offspring because they're actually quite related to the queen's offspring. That's cool. Yeah. And as I understand it, they mainly make new queens to have that queen go off and make a whole new hive.

And then the other way here is if the existing queen is underproductive, they do a process called supersedeger. It's what humans. All of these are human names. They don't call it that. But the tens of thousands of worker bees will sense together that the queen is no longer laying enough eggs. And then they say if there's not enough eggs, there won't be enough workers, so there won't be enough honey. So we have to depose and replace the queen. Right.

Yeah. Because honey is what our home is made of. It's what our bodies depend on for calories and protection from disease and everything else. Like they'll begin a process tens of thousands of them to say the question. queen is done. That's it. Like, you can think of the hive as like the entire collective bee community is there to like propagate itself forward through making as many new generation of bees as possible. Yeah, that's why they gather. That's why they're working together. Yeah. And like we said on

the previous bees episode, other species of bees don't do that. Right. They just are individually storing and reproducing and doing their own thing. Right. And again, because like there's genetic shenanigans that makes them very highly related to each other and the queen bees offspring. Yeah. And those genes also are where a lot of their pheromone and chemical production comes from. And I'm going to link to popular science about a 20-25 study. It's from a team at the University of British Columbia. They found that some common viral infections for bees will shrink the ovaries of the queen.

and apparently other bees can detect this because of a chemical. The queen produces a pheromone that they describe it as keeping the workers loyal, but the pheromone is called methyl oleate. So if the queen's ovaries shrink, they make less methyl oleate, and the worker bees, quote unquote, smell the queen's weakness, and then begin preparing a successor. This gets turned into like Henry VIII and medieval feudalism stuff, but it's really just an amazing social process.

involving chemicals and DNA and everything else. If you kind of think about our bodies, right, as like the cells in our bodies do similar things. They sense when there's something wrong with other cells and then they go and they'll, like, kill their own cells and, like, or, you know, it's root out weakness in your own body. So if you think of like a beehive as each bee is sort of part of a larger organism of this beehive, it makes a lot of sense because it's not so much them going like, we don't like the queen. she's not ruling correctly as like just basically a whole system finding weakness and then rooting it out so that it can the entire quote unquote major organism which is the whole hive can continue to survive totally yeah it's that much of a natural group process they didn't decide they don't like the queen morally or something right it's amazing and it's all for the it's all

specifically for honey it's honeybees specifically that was me deciding that I don't like I don't like her. She wore a tan suit. That's a reference from like 2010 probably. Anyway. Yeah. If you don't understand it, good. So. Yeah. Shame. Shame. You don't produce enough ovary hormone. That's from Game of Thrones. Yeah, that's like a eight year reference. I wanted to say 2010, but yeah, a little more recent. That's good. That's better. And then we have one final takeaway that I foreshadowed. Takeaway number five of the main show. U.S. honey has been radioactive since the start of U.S. atomic bomb testing.

Ah. And apparently there's no need to worry about it. And there's also nothing we can really do. But like to this day, a lot of U.S. honey has trace amounts of the elements cesium. Because of atomic tests beginning in the 1950s. Yeah, I mean cesium. That sounds healthy to have to eat. Yeah, maybe let's call it B-Zium. That's fun. Then it's on theme. A-Zm, B-Zium and C-Eum.

A-Zium and B-Zium and C-Zum. Have you ever listened to that song, the Elements song that goes da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, yeah. Based on Gilbert and Sullivan, it's very good. really fun yet. And if you want to listen to that song, cesium will be around number 55. It's atomic number 55 on the periodic table. And it's in honey because of how honey is made by honeybees. It's a combination of the bees who make it and the plants they get nectar from. And according to a 2021 study by researchers at the College of William and Mary, most U.S. honey is not just the

bees and the plants, it's also cesium released by hundreds of atomic bomb tests starting in the 1950s. According to popular mechanics and also the bulletin of atomic scientists, the cesium isotope cesium 137 was scattered into the atmosphere by hundreds of atomic bomb tests that we started in the 1950s and stopped in the 1960s due to international treaties about blowing up atomic bombs. Oh, right, yeah. And Earth scientist Jim Cass to the College of William and Mary describes what happened next. Quote, Cezium 137 drifted thousands of miles through the stratosphere over the dry American West and later fell with rain in the humid subtropical land east of the Mississippi River.

Plants in potassium-rich soils ignored the radioactive isotope favoring to send potassium up its straw-like channels instead. But plants in potassium deficient soils of the southeast confused cesium-137 with potassium. These plants then manufactured nectar spiked with cesium-137 that unsuspecting bees gathered, brought back to their hives, and transformed into cesium-137-infused honey in amounts that remain detectable today. Is this bad for the bees? So it was bad for the bees. and possibly humans. Oh dear.

And Jim Cass stresses that he loves honey, he eats it with his kids. None of us are impacted today. However, quote, the cesium levels probably exceeded some national standards in the 1960s and the 1970s. And the next study he wants to do is whether this radioactive cesium caused a decline in southeastern U.S. honeybee populations that is recorded. We just don't know why. But like in that era, the 60s and the 70s. Gosh, like, did it have like a noticeable effect on, say, cancer rates or behavior? That would be the question.

And the hope is that it's just such a tiny amount of cesium that did not. But like bees bodies are smaller. So if it impacted anybody, it's probably bees before us. Yeah. Poor little guys, girls. Mostly girls. Yeah. Just like a couple guys, but most of them are girls.

Right, and it's mostly ladies. So this is anti-feminist and misogynist. It is sexist. Yeah. I'm installing a new queen who will solve all of it. That's what I'm doing. Girls getting messy. And again, we are told everybody's fine today listening to this.

Everything's fine. So that's good. Yeah, don't panic. Don't like throw all your. Honey out. Yeah, eat honey. It's great. And also, like, this is such a natural phenomenon involving so many bees and so many plants that those little changes happen, you know? It's amazing. Now that you say that, though, and thinking about the timeline, Winnie of the Pooh has been eating massive quantities of honey since, what, the 1930s? When did that come out? So, like,

he's British, though. Fingers crossed. Yeah. Would he have avoided it by being in the UK? The study says that it's because of where the U.S. specifically tested bombs. I see. So the Pacific Ocean and the Mountain West and the desert. Then it like blew east. So yeah, so legitimately like Chernobyl doesn't matter that much and other things that were too far west. So OG Winnie the Pooh from the books is fine.

But Disney Winnie the Pooh is probably riddled with tumors. Where he's vaguely not British and more American. Yeah, I think so. So, yeah, Disney's fault, I guess. Yeah. Unfrease Walt and yell at him, you know. I know that's a myth. Don't write to me.

I have a supernumery nipple picklet. I know you're just describing a mutation, but I thought of the man with the golden gun from James Bond. So I like the idea that Winnie the Pooh has the golden gun. Yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering.

this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the honey pot ant species makes some of the most antimicrobial honey on earth and stores it in specialized butts of specialized workers. Takeaway number two, spotted lanternflies are making a demonic false version of honey in Philadelphia. Takeaway number three, according to recent scientific discoveries, Honey has minor health benefits for humans because it has enormous health benefits for the bees.

Takeaway number four, because honey is not just food but medicine and so much more for a honeybee, the hive overthrows and deposes queens as soon as they are not productive enough. Takeaway number five, U.S. honey has been radioactive since the start of major U.S. atomic bomb testing. And then so many numbers this week about everything from the most ancient human honey gathering we have ever rediscovered to the hydrogen peroxide in honey to the origin of the bottles being shaped like bears. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obvious incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode.

This week's bonus topic is tips on some of the most amazing honeies in the world. Have the best honey. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of almost 25 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfund.org. Key sources this week include a lot of wonderful science writing from Popular Science, Smithsonian Magazine, Ars Technica,

also university experts from Coventry University in the UK, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the U.S., the University of Sydney and Australia. I also want to highlight work for Knowable Magazine by NPR's science writer Burley McCoy, work for The Guardian by assistant science editor Donna Liu. Atlas Obscira is a particularly strong photography source this week, and then the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is one source for that story about CCM-137 going from atmospheric atomic testing to most of the honey in the U.S. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking. The traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people and the Wappendrew people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord where we're sharing stories, and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 252.

That's about the topic of Bastille Day. And fun fact there, the fall of the Bastille and the result. French Revolution made British royalists panic so hard they invented the Illuminati conspiracy theory. So I recommend that episode, especially because if you're hearing this when it releases Bastille Day is tomorrow. I know when that is.

I just got to check the release schedule. Anyway, I also recommend Katie Golden's amazing podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sous. for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. Thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we

will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. And by the way, yes, this Honey show released July 13th. Bastille Day is July 14th. And then July 20th, we will share our 300th episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Members should get commemorative art for that. On that, day, if not right before or shortly after. And I'm thrilled about all that celebration that we're going to get to do next week. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows supported directly by you.