Cosmic Honey
“The federal government long claimed that it knew evreything about marijuana that was necessary; it was, as US Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger used to say, “a killer drug.”
But during the sixties, as middle class college students started smoking dope, the government became convinced that it might need a little more data. Unfortunately, a major trouble with experiments being conducted was that the marijuana varied greatly in quality, rendering results questionable.
So the government decided to grow its own. They picked a site near the University of Mississippi campus on land belonging to US Senator James Eastland. To protect the crop, they surrounded the field with a barbed wire fence, put in searchlights, and hired armed guards.
The students checked out the defenses, and as one student recalls, “generally decided the place was impregnable.” But some students, fustrated by the idea that pasures of plenty were so near and yet so far, came up with a solution that showed that good old American ingenuity we all respect.
What they did was simple. They placed bee hives outside the fence. The bees flew in, pollinated the marijuana plants, and returned to the hives to make some of the best honet anyone had ever eaten.”
-Great Speckled Bird, 1972
Great Speckled Bird, Georgia newspaper, January 24, 1972
Beekeeper sucking on smoker, 1937