Honey Fungus
Causes illnessArmillaria species · also called armillaria, bootlace fungus
Honey fungus is a serious tree pathogen and a widely eaten mushroom — and it grows in exactly the same places as the deadly Galerina. That overlap makes the spore print non-negotiable: white for honey fungus, rusty brown for Galerina.
Quick facts
- If eaten
- Causes gastric upset in a significant minority of people even when properly cooked, and must never be eaten raw. More importantly, it shares habitat with the deadly Galerina — this is a genus where a spore print is essential rather than optional.
- Under the cap
- gills
- Spore print
- white, cream
- Cap
- Honey-yellow to tan, often with fine dark scales towards the centre.
- Stem
- Tough and fibrous, with a whitish ring, growing in dense fused clusters.
- Growing on
- wood dead, wood living
- Season
- Autumn.
How to identify it
- White spore print. Take one. This is the difference between honey fungus and a lethal Galerina.
- Dense clusters fused at the base, on or around stumps and living trees.
- Ring on the stem and fine dark scales on the cap.
- Black bootlace-like strands (rhizomorphs) often visible under nearby bark.
What it is confused with
One test settles each of these.
Spore print. White means Armillaria, rusty brown means Galerina and potential death.
Read this before anything else
- Never eat a wild mushroom identified by a website or an app.That includes this one. These tools narrow possibilities; they cannot see your mushroom, its base, its smell or its habitat, and the difference between a meal and a liver transplant is sometimes a feature buried in the soil.
- Get it confirmed in person by an experienced local forager or a mycological society. Most regions have one, most run free identification sessions, and they will look at the actual specimen.
- Dig, do not pull. The cup at the base of a death cap is often underground. Pulling the mushroom leaves the most important feature in the soil.
- If someone has eaten a wild mushroom and feels unwell, call poison control now — in the US, 1-800-222-1222. Do not wait for symptoms to worsen. Amatoxin poisoning has a false recovery phase, and delayed treatment is what makes it fatal. Save any uneaten pieces for identification.