One taste, and the beekeeper was certain: this was no ordinary honey.

Sean Kennedy had been showing off the hives he tends in Northwest Washington one autumn afternoon when he removed a glove for a taste test. This was how the self-taught beekeeper ate most of his honey, by plunging a finger into a row of honeycomb and slipping it under his protective head covering to his mouth. Lately the flavor had been, well, different.

The invasion of the spotted lanternfly was impossible to miss this past summer in the Washington region. The scarlet-winged leafhoppers wreaked havoc on trees, threatened Virginia’s multibillion-dollar wine industry and ushered in a spectacle of state-sponsored squashing. This fall, the insect’s impact on the area has shown up in a less obvious way: It’s changing the honey.

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.

And voilà: honey. Maybe not what you’d find in a bear-shaped container on a grocery store shelf. But honey nonetheless, a darker, mysterious new kind that’s shaking up the beekeeping world. The phenomenon first happened several years ago in Pennsylvania, where the spotted lanternfly was discovered in the United States around 2014 after apparently hitching a ride from China aboard a shipment of stone.

Since then, the unusual honey it helps make has traveled to Copenhagen for sampling at an international apiculture conference and popped up as a niche product in lanternfly-addled corners of the country (The name given by Philadelphia Bee Co., which sometimes sells out of it? “Doom Bloom”). And there’s this: Universities are studying it for potential health benefits, with promising results so far.

“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.

For his part, Kennedy wasn’t sure what to think initially. He’s been fascinated with bees since childhood, when he first stared in awe at a beekeeper collecting a swarm. He thought it was “the coolest thing on Earth” and decided he would do that one day — a dream put on hold as he studied geology, worked in the Clinton administration and became an energy entrepreneur. About seven years ago, it hit him that if he was going to be a beekeeper, he’d better get started, and he binged how-to books and YouTube tutorials.

Now he runs the apiary on the embassy’s rolling acres in Woodley Park, producing a sunny, floral honey sold on-site once a year, often with a limit of one jar per person. When the new stuff appeared in his hives this September, he sent a query to the neighborhood internet mailing list: Should he offer this “rare late-season honey with a remarkable backstory” during the December sale?

“Think of it as a bit of ‘turning lemons into lemonade’ — the bees have taken a new challenge and created something unique,” he wrote.

Honey made from honeydew is common in Europe, which is so far spotted-lanternfly-free but has other bugs that secrete the substance. They call it forest honey and are less fazed by the means of production.

But for the U.S., it’s new. 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.

“The beekeepers were like, ‘What is this weird honey?’” Underwood recounted in an interview. When she handed out samples to prominent beekeepers from across the state, “Everybody tasted it and said, ‘This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever tasted.’”

It was a true mystery, a kind of whodunit that made the local TV news. 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.

For Underwood, spotted lanternfly honeydew honey has become an unexpected research focus, though she admits she falls into the “Yuck, don’t put this in my mouth again” category when it comes to the taste. A page on Penn State Extension’s website includes an FAQ for beekeepers, including how to avoid extracting it. Because of the bug’s life cycle, honeydew has made its appearance in August or September in Pennsylvania and the D.C. area, after bees have already made honey from nectar. So the more familiar type can still be collected.

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.

So does that mean people should stop the “stomp on sight” approach advised by officials? No, Underwood said, stressing the harm lanternflies cause to plants.

“We don’t really want them, but if they’re going to be there, then the bees can take advantage. That’s how I see it,” she said.

Despite all the squishing, the bug has become established in 15 states in the last decade, marching from the Mid-Atlantic into the Midwest. Locally, it was first reported in rural parts of Maryland and Virginia in 2018 and steadily spread across both states and into D.C. One sign of how entrenched these things have become? In September, there were so many, they appeared on weather radars in the region.

Jan Day surveilled the summertime explosion of lanternflies in her Capitol Hill neighborhood warily, wondering what it would mean for her honey. As president of the DC Beekeeper’s Alliance, she heard from a lot of Beltway beekeepers with similar concerns; she described the feeling among the group of 175 or so as something like dread. They worried they might have to change the way they manage their hives — or that their honey would be ruined.

Then, around September, an alliance member with hives in D.C. posted in a club forum that he had just harvested a batch.

In the end, only a few beekeepers in the club reported ending up with it. Those who did described the smell in their hives as “everything from smoky barbecuey to earthy, leaf-littery to wet socks,” said Day, whose honey was not affected. Some of that doesn’t sound appetizing, but: “I tell myself if it’s good enough for the bees, if the bees are okay with it, I have a little more faith in it,” she said.

Del Voss, who goes by the nickname “D.C. Honey Guy,” has branded the spotted lanternfly-bee collaboration as his “fall honey.” He hasn’t been sure how, exactly, to describe it to the customers he’s gained over 15 years of beekeeping in the city, including scores of individual consumers, the Italian grocery store A. Litteri and the acclaimed, hard-to-get-into restaurant Pascual. Voss, 59, who learned beekeeping growing up on a farm and often tends to his hives without gloves, joked that “Want to try my insect-poop honey?” might not land.

Chatting up an unsuspecting customer on a recent morning at Hill’s Kitchen, a Capitol Hill shop that stocks his product, he went with: “This darker honey is influenced by spotted lanternfly.”

Ryan Lee, who was waiting to purchase an armful of cookware when Voss offered a sample, asked how.

“Well, taste it first,” responded the beekeeper, sporting a shirt with a honeybee pattern. He squeezed a drop onto a small wooden spoon.

After Lee tried the fall honey and a more standard summer version, declaring both “very good,” he got the backstory. Then he decided to buy a bottle: the spotted lanternfly kind. It turned out he wasn’t put off by it — although he stopped Voss as he noted again “that’s insect poop.”

“Maybe we should just not talk about that,” Lee said, and they both laughed.

As for Kennedy, enough people were intrigued by his email blast about the “rare, late-season honey” that he decided to offer it at the embassy’s Dec. 13 sale.

On a weeknight this month, a group of aspiring beekeepers gathered in his unfinished basement to jar the year’s harvest: first the usual stuff, then the new addition. Working together with Kennedy supervising as their mentor, they poured honey from a stack of five-gallon buckets into glass containers. Everyone’s hands were sticky within minutes.

Kennedy pulled a pack of shrink-wrapped labels out of a bag and displayed them on a table. He had considered putting “XXX” or a skull and crossbones on the spotted lanternfly variety. In the end, he went in a different direction.

“Special edition 2025,” says the text on a gold sticker. In the middle is a familiar image: a bug with brilliantly spotted, bright-red wings.