The mystery of blue honey (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The mystery of blue honey (2010)

ourstate.com

34 pointsjs226 comments

Honeybees are livestock bred and raised on a farm. As such, we often treat them using various veterinary substances to reduce or prevent disease (nosema, tracheal mites, varroa mites, fouldbrood, etc). Many of these treatments taint the honey, making it unfit for human consumption. To that end, colourants are often added so the farmer can identify such honey if any makes it out of the brood box and into the honey supers.

I don't understand why there is any mystery.

I like the explanation. Including a dye to mark the honey unfit to markets would have a lot of sense. Is pretty smart.

>While the honeybee flies and forages, it is fueled by the nectar in its honey stomach. When Ambrose field-stripped bees in his study, the bees arriving at the blue honey hives never had blue in their stomachs, but the bees leaving the hive did.

>“That tells you something is happening to the nectar after it reaches the hive to change the color,” Ambrose says.

Sounds like it's a different issue. They are saying they can't determine exactly what the source is

Oxydendron is an Ericaceae, same as the blueberry. There are lots of very good honey made of this family, and even some sligthly poisonous as Rhododendron's honey. None of them are this blue. Blueberry honey is amber and the well known Oxydendron honey is just ligther in color. Unless something has changed in the mix is dubious that is the culprit here.

One possibility would be some bee antifungus treatment using methylene blue, because it does not contain copper (Anything with copper would be toxic for bees). This does not explain the aluminium in any case.

Other could bee hydrangeas treated with aluminum to remain blue, but I'm just speculating. Bees are attracted only by some hydrangeas that don't need this. They like my blue bird Hydrangea serrata for sure.

Additional sources due to the April 1 publication date.

Discussions among bee keepers pre-dating the article:

https://www.beesource.com/threads/blue-honey.206810/

https://www.beesource.com/threads/blue-comb-honey.211073/

https://www.beesource.com/threads/blue-honey.220430/

A beekeeper blogging about their hives with purple honey in 2014:

https://peregrinfarms.wordpress.com/2014/08/21/purple-honey/

An article from Oct 2018:

https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/news/83072/rare-blue-honey-...

The article mentions Dr. Ambrose originally did his tests back in the 70s. I was not able to find any publications related to that research, although he did do tests on the effect of solid rocket fuel exhaust (including Al2O3) on honeybee colonies [1]. This report didn't mention anything about blue honey though.

To those saying colorants from bee treatments -- I don't think it happens anywhere outside of North Carolina, which suggests it may be a local effect. But that's a good hypothesis.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19800020513

Maybe this is another case of the bees foraging near an M&M's factory? https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/pollution-ecology/bee-blu...

Since the honey also happens to be blue in this case, couldn't it be possible that these keepers are wrongfully blaming the M&M's factory? I think the main point of the article was that everyone has their own theory of what the cause is and are all pretty adamant about it:

>Some beekeepers, like Sheppard, swear the berries are to blame for the odd blue honey, which appears intermittently at most, and only in limited hives near the state’s Coastal Plain. Other keepers suspect it might be nectar from the kudzu that grows rampant over nearby fields and forests. Near Dunn, keepers with traces of blue in their hives point to the grapes the bees frequent. And in the eastern part of the state, beekeepers are watchful of the plant Summer Titi, or southern leatherwood.

Speaking of honey, some rhododendron honey can be poisonous https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/28/honey-poisonin...

also called mad honey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayanotoxin

I didn't knew that Scilla, Epilobium and Phacelia have blue pollen... interesting

If blue honey appears in june-july is too late for Scilla in any case. Beekepers culture Phacelia that is also an US native

The original publication date looks...suspicious.

There are other articles with different dates.

The most promising keyword here would be chlorosis to me.

The dye is added by men and is an one-off event. Can't be a plant, for sure. That would not have any sense

Could be a treatment or colored sugar, but then the beekeeper would know about it. As is against their interests to have blue honey they would stop doing it.

Can't be copper sulfate sprayed in the crops. The bees would die.

Could be somebody trolling, but then the beekeeper would suspect it

So this left us with the blueberry fields, that are a synonym of chlorosis, that explains the aluminium

UPDATE: See also the Bregma's explanation above

I've linked to additional sources here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32810786

Great quote: “The best explanation is usually the simplest, but in this case, it’s not.”

> This story was published on Apr 01, 2010

There are other articles with different dates.

Please share. The searches I did for blue honey only turned up some psychedelic concoction people are making with mushrooms.

Indeed.

There are some articles about the M&M factory runnof theory and an article about Kudzu plants. But all of these articles were published years later.

Could this actually be an april fools that keeps on giving? And from time to time some groups find opportunities to make soe noise in the media about it?

I would like to see an article published earlier than this. And also, since they claimed they experimented, maybe an article in a science journal or in North Carolina State University's archive.

Not an article, but a thread of beekeepers discussing it in 2008. At least shows it predates the article.

https://www.beesource.com/threads/blue-honey.220430/

I've linked to additional sources here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32810786

Obviously it's the crystal meth.

tl;dr: They don't know, maybe aluminum traces in the pollen.

My guess is that somebody added food coloring to the honey, or fed the bees sugar water with color to get attention.

Some beekeepers have been known to add food coloring to sugar water, not for attention, but so they can better identify real honey that their bees produce vs “honey” that the bees have stored from the sugar water.

This could only be the work of Heisenberg.

What kind of twit mods that down?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com