If you’re an East Coast to Midwest bitch, chances are you’ve encountered Lycorma delicatula at some point over the last few years. Commonly called the spotted lanternfly, these insects are easily spotted (ha!) with rich gray forewings that conceal vibrant red hind wings, both layers of which are stunningly polka-dotted. If Pixar were making a bug populated film noir cartoon, a spotted lanternfly would play the femme fatale, and not only based on looks — the pretty flies are deadly!! …to a plethora of industries, including lumber and wine, which is why they’re officially classified as invasive to the US.

And here’s another way in which spotted lanternflies are wreaking havoc: the critters eat sap off of trees and plants, which makes for very sweet poop. Or, as it’s called in the insect world, honeydew (what a euphemism). And apparently, bees are more than happy to suck up honeydew and give it the ole’ nectar treatment in their production of honey. Around six years ago, US beekeepers started noticing a palpably different color, smell, and taste to late-season honey their bees were producing:

Honeydew? Yes please, say honeybees: Honeybees, it turns out, are attracted to the sticky, sugary substance that spotted lanternflies leave behind after slurping tree sap in late summer and fall months, during the adult phase of their life cycle. The proper term for this substance is honeydew, but that’s really just another word for poop. Bees suck it up and bring it back to their hives, where they treat it like nectar — spitting it into honeycombs and furiously fanning it down with their wings to reduce the water content.

There are sommeliers for honey?? “It’s getting to be the buzz around the world,” said Carla Marina Marchese, who founded the Connecticut-based American Honey Tasting Society and trained in Italy as a honey sensory expert — essentially a sommelier. Some beekeepers worried it would be “like a stain on the American honey industry,” she said. But as a professional taster, she was intrigued and even excited. She’s had several samples and said the flavor varies, but the common notes include smoky, savory, salty, resinous and lightly fruity.

The nose knows: In Pennsylvania, the first sign that something was up was the smell. Around the fall of 2019, beekeepers opened their hives and got hit with a smoky, bacon-like scent instead of the usual floral one. The honey inside was a dark, reddish color, almost like maple syrup. Stumped, some beekeepers turned to Penn State for answers. Their calls were routed to Robyn Underwood, who holds a PhD in entomology (a.k.a. the scientific study of bugs) and works as an educator for Penn State Extension.

Like a true investigation, DNA ID-ed the criminal: DNA testing helped crack the case, showing varying amounts of spotted lanternfly in the honey. That’s what led Underwood and other researchers to close in on the inch-long, polka-dot critter as the culprit. They reasoned that the bees (also not native to North America, incidentally) had taken a few years to catch onto the sweet new snack that now coated local trees in late-summer months, when flowers have mostly stopped blooming and nectar runs dry.

Could this be America’s ‘liquid gold’? Underwood is currently studying spotted lanternfly honey’s medicinal possibilities in collaboration with Ferhat Ozturk, a University of Texas at San Antonio professor of biology and expert on the topic. Early results suggest it could rival manuka honey, a pricey New Zealand variety that’s sometimes called “liquid gold” and has the distinction of being the only type approved for use by American hospitals in wound treatment.

[From WaPo]

Carla Marina Marchese “trained in Italy as a honey sensory expert.” Whelp, another culinary career where I could’ve been a contender, if I’d only known! But the real $64,000 question is: would YOU try insect-poop honeydew honey? The WaPo article also points out that honeydew honey is already prevalent in Europe, where it’s called forest honey. And before you say, “Yuck, I’d never!” I kindly remind you that the way bees make honey from nectar requires several rounds of regurgitation. As Penn State’s Robyn Underwood reiterates on the FAQ page mentioned, honeydew honey is entirely safe to eat and sell. Going off of the descriptions of it being smoky, methinks this honey variant would be delicious spread over things like cornbread or challah.

According to Cornell University’s rigorously updated distribution map, spotted lanternflies have crossed into 17 states already, bursting out in all directions from their initial landing in Pennsylvania. They didn’t show up in my area (or I didn’t notice them) until last year. To stop the spread, protocol is to squash them on sight; commuters zealously stomping out flies until there’s a sea of red-accented carcasses is a tableau I won’t easily forget. And yes, even with beekeepers successfully making honey out of lantern fly poop, experts still advise to squash on sight.

Photos credit: Jermaine Lewis and Arthur Brognoli on Pexels, Sebastian Schuster and Magi Kern on Unsplash