There’s some good news today for those who are tired of squashing spotted lanternflies. They’ll still be swarming around trees and fruit crops, but it turns out those beautiful, invasive bugs are doing something good for the world.
Ryan Williamson comes from a family of beekeepers. As a kid, he remembers running around barefoot, stepping on bees and getting stung, but he also recalls the sweetness of the harvest.
“Chewing on the fresh honeycomb — what kid doesn’t like honey?" he recalls.
Today he runs a small, commercial business in Albemarle County. Each spring, his bees make the rounds, collecting nectar from wildflowers and trees.
“In this area, our nectar flow, where the bees are able to bring in excess nectar and make honey, that starts in mid-April and typically starts to wane in mid-June,” he explains.
With less food around, they’d start eating their own honey or feeding on sugar water provided by beekeepers, but this year, the bees did neither. They just kept on making honey well into July.
“And that’s like Whoa! This has never happened before. Our family’s had bees in this area for 35 years and never had a July nectar flow of this type, and the honey tasted different. It had an orange-ish color. The viscosity was different than normal honey. It’s thicker, stickier and stringier.”
He sent a sample to Virginia Tech, and laboratory analysis showed his bees had been feeding on something excreted by spotted lantern flies.
“Their whole thing is to tap into the sap of whatever plant they’re on, and they’re pulling what they need out of the sap, which is minerals and I believe also proteins, and they don’t want the sugar so much, and what they do is they excrete what we call honeydew, which is a super sweet substance, much more concentrated than regular sap would be.”
At the farmer’s market in Charlottesville, this new kind of honey proved popular. We spoke with Glen Lentz, Ziz Sarikar, Susie Rowley and Hailey Rousso.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. That’s phenomenal."
"Wow – yes.It’s so good."
"That’s totally different, almost a little molasses or something."
"It’s very fruity, almost like citrus.It has a little tang to it, which I like a lot.”
Williamson likes it on cheese, meats or roasted vegetables.
Honey has also been used to heal wounds, and the stuff made from spotted lanternfly honeydew is especially powerful. On the podcast Interviews with Experts, Penn State research biologist Robyn Underwood cites laboratory tests.
“If you can picture a petri dish, and you cover it with bacteria, and then you put a drop of honey in the center, it doesn’t allow the bacteria to grow," she explains. "The bigger the circle around where that honey was, the more antibacterial it is.”
It’s even better than Manuka honey.
“Manuka is the gold standard!” Underwood concludes.
Williamson says this year’s harvest was about half what he usually sees before the spotted lantern fly brought him a bumper crop in July and August. He’s been talking with other beekeepers in places like Pennsylvania, and he’s sorry to report this new trend may not last.
“This may or may not be the only year we get it, and that’s because nature finds a balance," Williamson says. '"Birds and other insects are learning they can eat this new bug in town.”
So he urges consumers to enjoy the spotted lantern fly’s sweet gift to American bees for now and to stop squashing them.
For more information go to sourwoodfarm.com or use this link to hear biologist Robyn Underwood talk with Frederick Dunn about the medicinal properties of spotted lanternfly honey:
Spotten Lanternfly HoneyDew Honey as a Medication, More Potent than Manuka Honey?
