The cannabis world is all a buzz about cannabis honey. The talk is not about taking honey and infusing it with cannabis, but rather feeding cannabis to bees and having the bees incorporate cannabis into the honey they make. It’s bee-made cannabis honey, not man-made.

The reason for the buzz is that bee-made cannabis honey has a much faster onset – “five to ten minutes compared with thirty to ninety” – together with “100 times the efficacy of cannabis-infused [i.e., man-made] honey.”[1] So it’s not the honey that’s making the cannabis more bioavailable; it’s something else.

What, exactly, are bees doing to the cannabis to make it so much more accommodating for medical cannabis use?!

This analysis seeks to answer two questions:

1. How do bees process cannabis?
2. How is bee-processed cannabis incorporated into honey?