Making honey pills is a nice way to make a sweet and edible treat out of any herb or herb formula that can be ground into a powder. Of course it only makes sense with herbs that release their medicinal compounds without being tinctured in alcohol but just from eating them. Honey pills are also a good way to make herbal medicine palatable to children and rolling the pills is a nice group work.

For our exhausting work days we made some Athletes Endurance honey pills. This herb formula that is also called Ginseng Endurance. It enhances breathing, recovery and is used against fatigue and it is widely used around the world in extreme sports and competitions.

The Athletes Endurance formula contains by weight:

• 18 % Radix Astragali Membranacei (Astragalus Root / Huang Qi)
• 16 % Radix Eleutherococci Senticosus (Eleuthero Root / Wu Jia Shen)
• 15 % Herba Rhodiola (Rhodiola / Hong Jing Tian)
• 9 % Radix Ginseng (Ginseng Root / Ren Shen)
• 8 % Radix Angelicae Sinensis (Tang Kuei Root / Dang Gui)
• 7 % Fructus Schisandrae Chinensis (Schisandra Fruit / Wu Wei Zi)
• 7 % Rhizoma Atractylodis Macrocephalae (White Atractylodes Rhizome / Bai Zhu)
• 7 % Ganoderma Lucidum (Ganoderma Mushroom / Ling Zhi)
• 5 % Sclerotium Poriae Cocos (Hoelen, Tuckahoe, Poria Sclerotium / Fu Ling)
• 4 % Radix Glycyrrhizae Uralensis (Licorice Root / Gan Cao)
• 4 % Cordyceps Sinensis (Cordyceps Mycelium / Dong Chong Xia Cao)

To make honey pills, the honey has to be cooked on low heat without a lid for about 1-2 hours to remove some of the water content and make it more sticky.

Then it is mixed with the ground herb formula while it is still warm and soft until the mix has a cookie dough texture. The honey to herb ratio is about 1:1 by weight.

It is then rolled out with a rolling pin and sliced with a pizza cutter or a knife into uniform pieces that are then rolled between the hands into gooseberry sized balls.

The pills are then baked on the lowest heat in the oven over night. As they have to be stirred from time to time they can also be baked in several steps.

To make the pills less sticky to each other in the end they are sometimes rolled in melted beeswax, but after baking they are just slightly sticky anyways.