French Bees Produce Blue and Green Honey 64
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."
I'd buy it. (Score:1)
Seems to me that different colored honey would be a big seller.
Hell yeah! (Score:3, Funny)
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!
Re:Hell yeah! (Score:5, Funny)
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That's a feature, not a bug! (Score:3)
Wow-- that's a feature, not a bug.
(Well, the bees themselves are bugs.)
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If only we had a process that could check the food to see if it is fit for human consumption or not.
Lets say a process where we start with a question, then we make an educated guess of the answer, we do test to validate or invalidate our test. We repeate the process until we come up with a solid model.
Lets call this process "science", yea it is a funny name. But instead of just going well it is a byproduct of industry it must be bad, we can see if there is anything harmful.
I'd buy it! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'd buy it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Sound like what they need is a marketing person. If it does taste the same, don't look at it as waste, look at it as a limited time premium product !
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Brilliant Blue FCF [wikipedia.org] Honey and Ketchup [usatoday.com] Yay!
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I heard all ketchup is green until dyed. They use unripe tomatoes and add corn syrup to sweeten it. Ripe tomatoes and sugar are obsolete.
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Yeah, there's nothing better than food contaminated with airborne pollutants. Sure, the color is possibly food dye, but you have no idea what other contamination gets introduced. That's why there's no way this would get past the regulatory agencies...
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That's what I thought. But I saw the pictures of them. I thought it was just a blue or green hue. But the honey is opaque, and that's seems actually a bit more disturbing than the color is.
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Good honey is sometimes opaque-whitish. Only processed honey looks golden transparent all the time.
oprahbees.gif (Score:1)
Because that's all I can think about right now
why no pics? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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Re:why no pics? (Score:5, Informative)
Pics:
http://nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/colourful-honey-france.jpg [wordpress.com]
http://nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/colourful-honey.jpg [wordpress.com]
http://nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/green-honey-france.jpg [wordpress.com]
From this article:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/05/french-beekeepers-blame-mms-candy-for-mysterious-blue-and-green-honey/ [nationalpost.com]
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Imported bees? (Score:2)
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Video (with pics) (Score:5, Informative)
The BBC has video, where you can actually see it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19840555
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It features an interview of a beekeeper, though not a french one but I soppose it doesn't matter this is just in order to get some expert's feedback
Re:Video (with pics) (Score:5, Informative)
There also are photos [lalsace.fr] from a local newspaper (if you use noscript, allow www.lalsace.fr [lalsace.fr], there are 12 photos, not only one).
Google Image [google.fr] in French has a few others.
I like the green one [cagou.com].
Also, this is not innocuous, as the queen bees have stopped to lay eggs due to the unusual food (source [ladepeche.fr] in French).
Finally, clickable link [bbc.co.uk] for the BBC video, for the lazy :)
(Aside note : Slashdot also removes UTF-8 in URLs, I had to use %E9 instead of é.)
Similar to this story about red honey. (Score:1)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html
Pics or it didn't happen (Score:1)
links with photos [google.com]
Where can I buy it? (Score:2)
. 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).
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If you'd love to have that - why not just get food-grade colorant/dye from a chemist and have at it?
For red, you can probably just use beet juice - hit up the internets on how to get a concentrate of that.
Coming Up Next.... (Score:2)
Some candy-sweet milk [slashdot.org] to go with your weird coloured honey.
Finally! (Score:2)
Something to go with my eggs.
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Something to go with my eggs.
Put parsley leaves in a blender for green eggs. An Iranian dish : "Kuku Zhab Zie."
Not surprised (Score:2)
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.
In Brooklyn, maraschino cherries made them red (Score:4, Interesting)
Halloween breakfast biscuit honey (Score:2)
And what about other chemicals? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The green honey makes you horny! (Score:2)
*ducks* :)
As a hobby beekeeper... (Score:1)
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.
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uh yeah, because radioactive contamination from nuke plants often goes unchecked and makes foodstuffs turn blue or green.
you're funny...
This is why I'm not interested in urban honey (Score:1)
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".
Address the problem? (Score:1)
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