Pine pollen with honey is one of the oldest ways people have taken pine pollen. In Korea the pair turns up in a summer drink called songhwa-milsu and in small pressed tea cakes called songhwa dasik, both made from the yellow pollen that drifts off pine trees in late spring. If you have seen a jar of honey flecked with yellow, or a recipe for "pine pollen honey water", this is where it comes from.
Songhwa-milsu, the Korean pine pollen honey drink
Songhwa (송화) means pine flower, the Korean word for pine pollen. Milsu (밀수) is honey water. Put together, songhwa-milsu (송화밀수, written 松花蜜水 in hanja) is pine pollen stirred into water sweetened with honey. Korean food writer Yoon Sook-ja, in a summer 2005 Koreana magazine article on hwachae (Korea's traditional fruit and flower punches), records it as a drink for the thirst that comes with summer heat.
The drink also goes by songhwa-hwachae. It was made with dried pollen from Korean red pine (Pinus densiflora) mixed into honeyed water, and it is recorded as a local specialty of Gangwon Province, in the mountainous northeast of the peninsula.
A 2019 Korean herbal column in Herald K describes the everyday home method. Dissolve the pollen in warm water, then add honey.
Pine pollen and honey pressed into tea cakes
The other Korean use is songhwa dasik. Dasik are small pressed sweets served with tea. Pine pollen is kneaded with honey into a stiff dough, then pressed into a carved wooden mold called a dasikpan, which stamps a flower, a pattern or a Chinese character into the top. Common characters on the molds are 壽, 福, 康 and 寧, for long life, luck, health and peace.
A 2006 tea column in the Seoul Shinmun calls songhwa dasik the most representative dasik of all. It was a required dish on royal banquet tables, and the same column says it was never missing from ordinary families' ancestral rite tables. The Joseon scholar Jeong Yak-yong described dasik as chestnut, sesame or pine pollen pressed with honey into molds shaped like flowers, fish and butterflies. Dasik became a ceremonial food at weddings in the Joseon period, and molds were carved for family events such as hwangap, the 60th birthday. The Seoul Shinmun column pairs it with green tea.
Total testosterone rose from 362.5 to 448.4 ng/dL in 8 weeks.
Song hua fen in Chinese herbal texts
Korea took the dasik idea from China, where pressed tea cakes go back to the Song dynasty. Pine pollen itself has a longer written record there. In Chinese it is 松花粉, song hua fen, and it has appeared in Chinese herbal texts since the Tang dynasty. The Bencao Gangmu, the Ming-era materia medica, describes its taste as sweet and warm. Song hua fen is still listed in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2020 edition). For the botany, the harvest and the history in one place, our full guide to pine pollen covers it start to finish.
How to take pine pollen with honey in the morning
The Korean recipe was pollen, water and honey. The modern version swaps the loose pollen for a dropper of extract and keeps the rest. Mara's Pine Pollen tastes soft and lightly earthy with a faint sweetness, so it sits well with honey and doesn't fight it.
- Warm a mug of water.
- Stir in a spoon of honey until it dissolves.
- Add one or two droppers of Pine Pollen and stir again.
- Drink it before you train or before you leave for work.
That's songhwa-milsu for a man with eight minutes before the gym. In summer, make it cold. Dissolve the honey in a splash of warm water first, then top up with cold water and add the dropper. If you'd rather have tea, a dropper goes into green tea with honey, the pairing that column suggests for songhwa dasik.
On days with no time for a mug, take the dropper straight under the tongue, hold it 20 to 30 seconds and swallow. Keep the bottle by the coffee machine and save the honey version for weekends, when the morning is slower.
Why the tincture beats a spoon of powder in honey
You can buy pine pollen powder and stir it into honey. The powder clumps when it hits liquid, floats on top of the water, and whatever doesn't dissolve settles at the bottom of the mug as yellow grit. The tincture mixes into warm water in a few stirs and leaves nothing behind.
Mara's Pine Pollen starts with wild-harvested, cracked-cell pollen of Pinus radiata. Each pollen grain has a hard outer wall, and cracking it opens the grain before extraction. The extract is spagyric. The pollen is extracted, then the minerals left behind are returned to the liquid, so the whole plant ends up in the bottle.
A dropper is the same amount every morning, which a heaped spoon of powder never is. And the bottle is dark Miron glass. Amber glass is a step in the right direction. Miron is the gold standard, and it keeps light off the extract for as long as the bottle lasts, which at one to two droppers a day is 30 to 50 days. An open bag of powder sits in the cupboard taking in air every time you open it.
Pine Pollen – Spagyric Pine Pollen Tincture
50 ml dropper bottle. Wild-harvested, cracked-cell Pinus radiata pollen.
Add to bagWhat men report, and what two pilot studies measured
Most of the people buying pine pollen today are men, and many of them first read that Scots pine pollen was the first plant material in which testosterone, epitestosterone and androstenedione were isolated (Šaden-Krehula, 1971).
Two human studies have since looked at men taking it. In the 2024 pilot by Wolkodoff and colleagues, 10 men aged 47 to 78 took pine pollen for 8 weeks. Their average total testosterone went from 362.5 to 448.4 ng/dL, and their qADAM questionnaire scores went from 23.9 to 31.7. A 2025 pilot with 11 men recorded free testosterone rising from 10.48 to 11.72 ng/dL, with SHBG falling. Men who take it daily report stronger morning wood and more drive. There's more on that in our post on pine pollen for men.
Pine Pollen considerations
Our recommendation, the same as on the product page, reads "Contains alcohol. If you're pregnant, nursing or taking medication, ask your doctor before using it."
Questions people ask
What is songhwa milsu?
Songhwa-milsu is a Korean drink of pine pollen stirred into honey water. It was traditionally made with Korean red pine pollen as a summer drink, and it is recorded as a specialty of Gangwon Province.
Can I mix pine pollen tincture straight into honey?
Yes. Put a dropper on a spoon of honey and eat it, or stir both into warm water or tea. The tincture blends in without clumps.
What does pine pollen with honey taste like?
Mara's Pine Pollen is soft and lightly earthy with a faint sweetness. Honey rounds the earthy note, and the drink tastes like a mild, slightly floral honey water.
How many droppers should go in the drink?
One or two droppers, once a day. At that rate a 50 ml bottle lasts 30 to 50 days.