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French Bees Produce Blue and Green Honey
jones_supa writes "Since August, beekeepers around the town of Ribeauville in the region of Alsace, France have seen their bees starting to produce honey in an odd blue or green color. Mystified, the beekeepers embarked on an investigation and discovered that a biogas plant 4 km away has been processing waste from a plant producing colorful M&M candies. Subsequently the bees had been carrying the waste to their nests. Agrivalor, the company operating the biogas plant, said it had tried to address the problem after being notified of it by the beekeepers. 'We discovered the problem at the same time they did. We quickly put in place a procedure to stop it,' told Philippe Meinrad, co-manager of Agrivalor."
Seems to me that different colored honey would be a big seller.
Don't say it's unsellable! Mark it up, partner with Mars, and tell me where I can buy some.
Because that's all I can think about right now
This story is worthless without pictures. I mean, it's about colors, goddamn it! I wanna see this so-called blue and green honey, and judge for myself whether it is actually blue or green.
Perhaps they were imported Tanzanian bees and went slightly patriotic on the honey color.
Ezekiel 23:20
The BBC has video, where you can actually see it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19840555
Seems to me that different colored honey would be a big seller.
Or at the very least, use it as a sweetener in confections? Foods that would otherwise have food coloring added.
That honey doesn't have to go to waste.
And if I were a bee and saw my hard work go down the toilet, I'd be buzzing mad!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html
links with photos
I'd love to have some blue, green and red honey on display and possibly on the toast
. Seems to me it should be perfectly safe since the candy color is approved for human consumption unless the colors get concentrated somehow (which I doubt).
Some candy-sweet milk to go with your weird coloured honey.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Yes, I like that. A mainly harmless demonstration on how waste gets back into our food. And yes, this mechanism works for other substances as well, we just don't see the poison...
Something to go with my eggs.
Then again, I wonder if they've checked the soil conditions lately to see if the aluminum content has increased or there was spillover contamination. High aluminum content in the soil will cause blue honey as well, there's a few places where this has happened before. NY State, North Carolina, I believe on in Iowa too.
Om, nomnomnom...
story here http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html?_r=0
This would sell for quite the price as novelty biscuit honey during Halloween at various breakfast cafes in the US. Green eggs, ham, orange grits, and blue biscuit honey. Yum.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Note how it made the news only because there is a visible effect. Let's just think how many other honey plantations and other crops were contaminated in ways that don't colour the produce.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
*ducks* :)
It always amazes me when people talk about the "purity" of honey. My bees would _prefer_ to collect water from a mud-puddle in a giant pile of manure than from an open bottle of Evian. Sure, honey kills any biological organisms that may be picked up but chemicals are another matter.
Blue honey? yay!
Green honey? eew.
They must have been concerned at the bery beginning since Ribeauvillé is close to Fessenheim nuclear power plant, which is the oldest operating in France and raises concerns about its safety (French president Hollande announced its closure by 2016).
...northern Ukraine and southern Belarus have been making glow-in-the-dark honey for about a quarter of a century now ;-)
Coming soon from Japanese bees, too.
Wow-- that's a feature, not a bug.
(Well, the bees themselves are bugs.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I get honey from the Santa Cruz mountains. It's "wildflower honey" or maybe "blackberry honey" or something like that, because the bees visit those types of fields.
Whenever I hear about urban beekeeping I think "mmmm.... dumpster honey", because that's where you see urban bees. "Ahhh... just a slight hint of rotten fruit thrown out by houskeepers who can't manage spoilage, with a hint of HFCS from soda residue".
When I read about honey all I can think is "what kind of mead would it produce?".
Like the problem with lack of entrepreneurial spirit? Let's start with marketing the green honey to Umberto Eco fans — anyone else read Baudolino?
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
This has already happened, years ago. Ask any knowledgeable beekeeper. Bees will go for anything with sugar-related content, good for them in the long run or not.
eat your honey
This proves beyond a reasonable doubt the inter-connectivity of the bio-systems, so whenever something like this happens we're just reminded that there are so many other things occurring that we have no clue about simply because nobody's looking.
The other sobering thing is that this incident tells me is that your first line of detection is just as likely to be someone that people may not necessarily pay any attention to at all, and that if someone eventually does listen to them, you can be certain that the parties responsible (large corporations) will always claim that they knew about it at the same time and took measures to address the "problem"; which means little more than they covered their asses from any possible litigation than actually doing anything responsible to determine the real scope and severity of the problem they caused.