Ok so this is something I was idly wondering about and when I looked it up it turns out that yes, cannabis is a bee friendly plant. Over the last few years it has become more and more important to plant with bees in mind. We want to attract bees to our gardens to help them stay healthy, find a place to grow a hive, and safely make more very small bees. Strangely enough there hasn’t been a massive amount of research done on the connection between bees and weed until relatively recently. Mostly we were just going off those who told us that their bees were very much attracted to cannabis plants. This led to questions about psychoactive honey, whether or not bees can get stones, and all sorts of other stuff. So you know what? We’re going to see if we can answer those questions and maybe a few others if I think of them while I’m writing this article.
Let’s get the easiest one out of the way which a few beekeepers have been asked, apparently. Can bees get high? Well the easy answer is no, not in the same way that we do. Bees don’t have an endocannabinoid system which is what lets our brains react to THC and other aspects of the cannabis plant. So bees aren’t flocking to cannabis plants because it’s getting them messed up. They are just doing bee things, like finding pretty sticky plants and just going to town on them. However, even if bees can’t get high on cannabis plants, they can actually feed on them. There are even those who say that bees may be able to use cannabis resin to make honey. This is very much an idea that is being played with currently rather than a definite fact since cannabis plants do not produce nectar.
A study published by Cornell University found that bees just go crazy for cannabis pollen. This means that it could actually work as a plan that will help bee populations increase, something that we desperately need to happen right now. Many people were confused by the findings because usually bees are into brightly coloured flowers, which weed plants don’t really have. So scientists were trying to figure out why the bees were so into weed as we need as much cross pollination as possible to keep essentially all the plants alive, including the ones that we need to live like vegetables. It is easy to keep cannabis plants bee friendly as they don’t really need pesticides, which usually drive the bees away. So yes weed is bee friendly, but how can we use it to improve dying bee populations.
As I already said bees seem to be insanely into cannabis pollen, we know it’s sticky but apparently to a bee it is super sweet and delicious. Other things we have discovered are that the height of the plants will alter how many bees flock to it, and hemp could be a massive support system for a variety of different life saving bees. The fact that loads of different types of bees love hemp is extremely important and means weed may be significantly more helpful than other bee friendly plants. Cannabis plants have an unique way of flowering which is what attracts all the different bees. The hemp flowers then provide life saving nutrition for the bees during a time where flowering is becoming more and more scarce.
The next stage of this could be growing cannabis crops next to fruit and vegetable crops. This could then massively improve cross pollination which we need to keep our crops thriving, and it wouldn’t be too bad for the weed crops either. As weed doesn’t need much water or any pesticides it creates a far healthier environment for the bees than many other similar crops. This will allow the bees to safely and happily repopulate helping us get bee numbers back into healthy figures. The other thing I love about the fact that weed can save bees is that it might alter the way people view cannabis. The attitude towards weed is still pretty negative across the globe but if people see it actively saving the bee population and by extension the human population that could be a big help for weed PR.
A few parts of the internet have been talking a lot about cannabis honey. This is honey made by bees who have been collecting the delicious sticky pollen from cannabis plants. Is it real? Well I can’t really tell you that definitely, but to me it seems unlikely. This is primarily because bees use nectar to create honey, and weed plants do not make nectar. It’s the pollen of the plants that the bees are super into. Primarily the idea of THC honey has come from an American company called Cannahoney. The honey is definitely made from bees that have access to cannabis plants. The company doesn’t seem to really claim that the honey gets you high, so they aren’t lying since the bees do go snuffling around cannabis plants.
There are a few articles that claim THC honey can be made from stoner bees, but none of them were from sources I trusted so I don’t feel comfortable using them. Some claim that bees can be trained to collect the psychoactive resin from the plants which doesn’t make sense for a whole bunch of reasons. Primarily that resin isn’t used to make honey and I’m pretty sure you can’t train bees to change the way they make things. So basically I’m pretty convinced that bees cannot make cannabis honey, but hey I’m not a bee or a honey scientist so who knows.
So essentially the point of this article is that cannabis, already known as a wonder plant, isn’t just amazing for humans. We can use it to save our dangerously dwindling bee population, which is pretty important for keeping our food stocks up. So grow weed, save the bees!
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