The Mystery of Blue And Green Colored Honey Solved!’
In 2012 Bees in northeastern France left their Beekeepers baffled by producing honey in mysterious blue and green shades. They could not solve the mystery of the colored honey in their beehives until they discovered that the bees were visiting a local M&M factory. Let’s dive into this fascinating story of candy-eating honey bees.
‘Not So Colorful’ Truth
In August 2012, beekeepers in Ribeauville, France flabbergasted over their honey. They discovered that honey produced in their apiaries turned shades of turquoise blue and emerald green color. Investigating into this mystery carried them to a biogas plant situated about 4 km away from their apiaries.
They discovered that the biogas plant has been processing waste from a ‘Mars’ plant located in Strasbourg, around 100 km away. The industrial honey bees, having discovered the sugary remnants of MnMs have brought them back to the honeycombs. The blue and green colorings on the M&M shells have been giving the honey their trademark color.
Agrivalor, the company operating the biogas plant, said it had tried to address the problem after being notified of the colored honey issue by the beekeepers. The company cleaned its containers, making closed containers to store incoming waste.
While the story was quite ‘colorful’, the beekeepers were not amused. All the ‘colored honey’ was ‘unusable’ and did not make it to the markets. France is the biggest honey supplier to the world, producing some 18000 tons of honey annually. The demand and supply gap in the honey industry has been widening rapidly. The rapidly declining bee populations due to industrialization, in addition to the increasing demand for honey, are reasons for this gap. So it is not surprising that wasting many batches of honey due to color did not come as good news.
Maraschino Honey
The same thing happened in May 2010 in Red Hook, Brooklyn. There, honey in some bee hives was bright red in color. The culprit for the red color was a Maraschino cherry company in Dikeman Street in Red Hook. The bees were sneaking in and pilfering away the sugary raw materials, carrying the red-colored pigment as well.
Honey Color and Value
So why does honey lose its value when it’s pigmented? While the quality of a honey sample cannot be quite determined by the color of the honey alone, it gives quite a bit of information about the sample. The type of flowers that the bees used in making the honey, and the storage conditions of the honey are some such information. The US Department of Agriculture puts honey into seven different color categories, ranging from water white to dark amber. This is useful as the color is also indicative of its flavor, with darker honey having a bolder, more robust taste.
Environmental Impact
These incidences also tell a story of the perils of urban honey farming. Because, as some farmers and environmentalists speculate, the bees seeking artificial sources of sugar may mean that their natural sources of food are becoming extinct. Also, some of these artificial sources that bees bring back to their hives could be detrimental to their health. There are known instances where the chemicals that the bees brought back destroyed entire colonies of honey bees. Bee numbers have been rapidly declining around the world in the last few years according to several researches conducted.
Conclusion
In 2012 Bees in northeastern France left their Beekeepers baffled by producing honey in mysterious blue and green shades. They could not solve the mystery of the colored honey in their beehives until they discovered that the bees were visiting a local M&M factory. All these facts hint at a possible future where all types of bees could become endangered and even go extinct. A world without bees would bode very badly for the man indeed, but that’s a story for another day.
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