Honey by bees that eat cannabinoids gives infused honey a run for its money

PhytoPharma International, the Israeli cannabis technology company, has introduced a honey naturally made by bees that eat cannabinoids. The honey they excrete contains the full spectrum of the cannabis plant within it, creating a vastly more potent, and complex product than that created when honey is simply infused with cannabis after-the-fact.

The bees consume the cannabis themselves, but they don’t get high, according to a report in Forbes. They don’t have a mammalian endocannabinoid system, so they’re passing the cannabinoids through their natural honey making process to create PhytoPharma’s CannaBeez cannabis honey.

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Utilizing low amounts of cannabinoids to achieve high performance, the bees create a highly potent honey that contains the full spectrum of cannabinoids, including CBD and THC. That’s because the highly bioavailable honey acts as a platform that will ‘host’ different strains of the cannabis plant.

“The pertinent thing that I feel is special about our product is that we are enhancing nature, by nature,” Avner Ben Aharon, CEO of Phytopharma International, told Forbes. “Although other people were trying to create natural honey with cannabis, only my inventor Ilan found a way to achieve it.”

“We combined the healing powers of cannabis with the amazing delivery capability of honey. We aim to continue to apply our unique brand of ‘nature-tech’ to cannabis medicine, food, and beverages, veterinary and cosmetic products,” said Ben Aharon.

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"There may be two optional mechanisms that can explain the honey’s high-efficacy," Ben Aharon continued.  "The honey serves as a high-efficient vector to cross the Blood-Brain Barrier. While producing the honey, cannabinoids are transformed in the bees’ stomachs into superiorly efficient molecules."

The honey has a uniquely reddish fuchsia color and is characterized by its rapid onset of cannabis effects —five to ten minutes compared with thirty to ninety. It also has 100 times the efficacy of cannabis-infused honey. According to Forbes, two grams of the stuff, which contain 50 ppm (0.1mg) of cannabis, reportedly alleviated pain significantly for fibromyalgia patients. CannaBeez honey is available in THC and CBD variants, packaged in pre-measured cooking syringes.

“In the future, if companies will prove that specific cannabis strains can cure or treat specific illnesses, then we can make honey from those specific strains, specifically to treat the correlating illness,” Ben Aharon said, hopefully.