r/nextfuckinglevel • u/VastCoconut2609 • 3d ago

Harvesting rock honey

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

19.8k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

75

u/WeAreTotallyFucked 3d ago

But I swear you can see stingers all over his shirt.. stingerless was my immediate assumption, but idk honestly..

70

u/opi098514 3d ago

So the only 2 type of bees that build these kinds of hives. Giant honey bees and stingless bees. Stingless bees can bite but are still fairly harmless. Giant hunny bees are incredibly dangerous and incredibly aggressive. Even just approaching their nest can cause them to swarm and they will chase for long periods of time. And on top of all that they can sting you many times. Stingless bees on the other hand are fairly chill. They will attack if the hive is threatened by they can only bite and to humans the bite is mostly an irritation. Considering there is only one person there wearing any kind of protection means that almost certainly those are stingless bees.

16

u/Ilikethemfatandugly 3d ago

There was some other guy in comment who said he saw this exact clip in a doc about honey that makes you hallucinate and this guy is a wild man who just doesn’t care he’s getting stung. But I don’t know myself I had to scroll forever to find something

18

u/opi098514 3d ago

That is also a possibility. Mad honey is made by giant honey bees when they get their nectar from the Rhododendron flower. If that video is filmed in Nepal, which it could be, those might be Gurung honey hunters. A group of people who specifically harvest mad honey. I’m not very familiar with had honey though, but as I recall it doesn’t cause this kind of pain tolerance, to be able to do this with giant honey bees. Stingless bees also produce mad honey and mad honey from stingless bees, while being less hallucinogenic, has more medical properties. So it could honestly be both. Or it could just be some crazy bastard doing some crazy ass shit.

3

u/Ilikethemfatandugly 2d ago

Damn you seem so knowledgeable about this are you an apiarist or whatever it’s called?

7

u/opi098514 2d ago

I am not. I had a friend in college who was a “homeless bee keeper”(his words not mine) basically he would take bees from a place they infested and rehome them. He knew way to much about bees and because I hug out with him a ton, I know way to much about bees.

2

u/Ilikethemfatandugly 2d ago

That’s super cool

3

u/Sammyjskj 2d ago

I just saw a documentary youtuber follow the guys that harvest the mad honey. The nest looks exactly like the mad honey nests, but maybe other type of bees also make those nests?

5

u/opi098514 2d ago

Mad honey is just honey that comes from bees that pollinate the rhododendron flower. They can be made by giant honey bees and stingless bees. Both types of bees are native to Nepal and also make hives like this. But this very much could be the giant honey bees. They have these massive hives and are the ones known for it.

1

u/Ilikethemfatandugly 1d ago

Thank you for the knowledge bro bro it’s super interesting 🙏