An encounter with poison honey

In the summer of 1982, I was conducting ethnographic research on Tibetan pastoralists in Langtang Valley north-west of Kathmandu Valley. When I was not conducting interviews, studying the Kyirong Tibetan language, or recording life histories, I immersed myself into Langtang community life working (usually with my friends Tengyal and his wife, Tsiring) in the fields and herding camps, and accompanying Langtang Tibetans on their trading trips down to mid-hill Nepali communities. I also joined Tengyal, a tall, thin man of 32, with piercing black eyes, on some of his trips to visit relatives and friends in the village of Syabru Besi, which lies at a day´s walk to the west of Langtang.

One chilly December day, while walking with Tengyal back from Syabru Besi through the forest below Langtang, I noticed a large honeycomb sticking out from the face of a cliff, about 20 feet above, “Do the Langtang people ever gather brang? I asked Tengyal (Brang is honey in the Kyirong Tibetan language). “Only occasionally, since most of the combs are high up on the cliffs,” he replied. “Also, it is not always worth the effort because there are two kinds of brang in Langtang. One kind, sabrang, is delicious, just like the honey you buy in stores in Kathmandu. But the other kind, zeebrang, is very different.”

What was zeebrang like? “When people eat zeebrang they become disoriented, fall down a lot, get their arms confused with their legs, throw up, have cramps in all their muscles, and cannot see properly, “Tengyal replied, laughing.

Over the course of the next month I asked several other Langtang inhabitants about the mysterious zeebrang. The answer was always more or less the same as Tengyal´s. “After eating zeebrang I puked like never before! I could not walk and had to crawl around on my hands and knees. There were cramps in alt my muscles and I could not see right for hours.” What kind of ¦ honey could cause such effects?

After hearing these accounts, I concluded that zeebrang must be fermented honey. The effect of zeebrang sounded similar to that of alcohol. I knew that alcoholic drinks, like mead, were made from honey, and, finally, there was the word zee. In Kyirong Tibetan zee is the verb for intoxication. Nqu.zee sung du” is Kyirong Tibetan for “I am drunk.” Zeebrang, literally translated, means intoxicating honey. Sa, on the other hand, is Kyirong Tibetan for eating. Sabrang, literally translated, means edible honey.

As the Langtang winter got longer and colder, my diet became progressively worse. In the early fall, when the alpine pastures were thick with grass, and the weather considerably warmer.

I had eaten well. There was always plenty of yak milk, cheese and yoghurt available, as well as a variety of edible wild greens and mushrooms. But in the cold of winter, everything dried up; the grass, and with it the milk, as well as mushrooms and wild greens.

By January, my diet had been reduced to potatoes, rice and millet or com mush, served with watery chili pepper sauce. This bland diet, in such bitterly cold weather, produced a tremendous calorie deficit No matter how much I ate, I always felt hungry again in a couple of hours. I began to fantasise about all the delicious foods that were unavailable to me: ice cream, omelettes, pastries and pancakes.

On an early morning in February, when my hunger was particularly acute, I ran into Pasang, a Langtang villager, carrying a load of wood up the trail. He said he had been out woodcutting and on the way back had found an old comb of zeebrang that had fallen from a cliff.

All I could think about was sweet golden honey. “Could I buy some zeebrang from you?” I asked. “You don´t have to buy it, 1 am happy to give you some. I was not going to eat it anyway. I was going to use some of the wax from the comb, feed a little of the honey to my yak, and throw the rest away.”
I went and got some empty film canisters, into which Pasang began stuffing pieces of the honeycomb. Pasang´s father said to me, “You be careful with that stuff, a man can die from eating zeebrang.” This is ridiculous, I thought to my self. how can someone die from eating fermented honey? Besides, I had heard of no one who had died from zeebrang.

The next morning, X went to sit on a large sunlit boulder, a few minutes walk below the house to write some notes. In my jacket pocket lay two film canisters of zeebrang. I popped the contents of one canister into my mouth. The taste was somewhat bitter, not sweet at all as I had expected. Still, I sucked what honey I could out of the comb and spat the wax out I then went back to writing my journal.

After about half an hour, a wave of dizziness suddenly rolled over me. I stood up and put thy hands on my knees. The dizziness intensified. Then a black haze blanketed my vision. I tried to run forward, and instead fell flat on my face. I seemed to have lost all coordination. I dragged myself towards Tengyal´s house, and collapsed as I reached the rough wooden steps leading up to it. After some more effort, I made it inside.

I felt freezing cold, especially my arms and legs, as if the circulation had been cut off. Agonizing cramps shot through my upper arms and back, and within moments every muscle seemed affected: .the muscles in my chest when I breathed, my fingers when I made a fist my tongue when I swallowed, even the back of my eyes when I blinked, I tried to remain as still as possible, but was suddenly overcome by nausea. I finally fell back into exhausted sleep.

The next thing I knew Tsiring was shaking me, saying “Tano bou you bay?!” (Are you all right?) Spasms of pain shot up my back, but the nausea had passed and my vision was clearer. I went back to sleep, and when I awoke it was dark outside. Tengyal, sitting in front of the fire. When I was finished telling him, he said, “You are lucky you did not die. A few people dilute a little zeebrang with water and feed it to yaks. Other than that it has no use.”

When I told him that I believed zeebrang was fermented honey, his reply was, “No it is not fermented honey. It is like poison,” When the rainfall is lower than normal in the Langtang Valley, he said, many plants do not flower but the rhododendron never fails to blossom. As a result, most of the pollen collected by bees in the dry years is from rhododendron, and honey made from this pollen is poisonous, said Tengyal. Apparently, in non-drought years, honey is collected from a variety of flowers, so that the toxic element is diluted in die honey.

It took me about 24 hours to recover completely from the zeebrang. After my return to the United States, my research showed that human encounters with toxic honey have a long documented history. In Anabasis, the Greek historian Xenophon describes an incident from 400 BC, when several Greek soldiers, while on a campaign near the Black Sea, were immobilised for four days after eating rhododendron honey.

My encounter with zeebrang taught me that new phenomena, encountered in foreign lands, are, at times, impossible to comprehend through translation, and can only be understood through direct first-hand experience. I am not suggesting that people should go looking for first-hand experiences with dangerous phenomena, just so they can better understand them. Nor am I saying that my encounter with zeebrang was a positive experience because it taught me about toxic honey. It is just mat new phenomena, no matter how accurately they may be described to us in another language, may still be impossible to understand through our existing conceptual categories. I thought that zeebrang was fermented honey because that was the only the only conceptual category I had to interpret zeebrang´s effects on people, as these were described to me by the Langtang Tibetans. After eating zeebrang, of course, I realised that it was not fermented honey. This realisation enabled me to ask more informed questions of the Langtang people, ones that allowed me to discover that zeebrang is toxic rhododendron honey.