Up high in the Himalayas, the giant honey bee collects "mad honey" high in psychoactive alkaloids. Long ago, lavender, an herb indigenous to the Tibetan plateau, was collected by Buddhist monks alongside this honey to counter psychosis, perhaps from the honey itself! When rainwater got in, spontaneous wild fermentation of these foraged ingredients by wild native microorganisms, the stardust as we like to call it, likely begat the first ever lavender mead.