Baffling purple honey found only in North Carolina | Hacker News Reader

Baffling purple honey found only in North Carolina

bbc.com

152 pointsrmason51 comments

Reminds me of the "discovery" of synchronous fireflies in 1990:

>Scientists got wise to the presence of synchronous fireflies in the U.S. in the 1990’s, thanks to the efforts of Faust, a citizen naturalist. “Growing up in east Tennessee, we called them lightning bugs. They're just part of summer,” she says.

In the early 1990’s, Faust read an article in a science news magazine that said there were no synchronous fireflies in the Western Hemisphere. “I thought, ‘Ours are synchronous – who do I tell this to?’” she recalls.

She wrote a letter to researchers, who came to Tennessee and studied those fireflies for the next twenty years.

[src] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/g-s1-935/synchronous-fireflie...

There's a lot of stuff in the world that's unique and special, but isn't common knowledge on the internet. I think more people should go out and look around for themselves!

I didn't realize all fireflies didn't tend to synchronized. Fun read. Fireflies are one of the only "bugs" from the south that I miss. Cicadas, I suppose, have a bit of a soft spot with me. Everything else... nope.

Cicadas are so bizarre. A couple of summers ago I was around Des Moines and Ames, IA and was completely baffled by the strange noise that seemed to be everywhere and yet impossible to localize. After a few days I heard someone talking about the cicadas and learned something new!

Come visit Japan in August; the cicadas are so loud throughout most of the country that you have to raise your voice to be heard.

Then one day they suddenly stop. I hear a big noise but outside is completely silent to my mother.

Be careful standing underneath a tree involved in ._cicida rain_.

Hahahaha no one warned me about this but luckily didn't get to _experience it_. :D

As I always tell my kids, aren't you glad they are the size they are instead of the size of a car!

what area are you located in now? We have fireflies in Michigan, cicadas as well

Pacific Northwest. And fair, I should have said east coast, not just south.

There are fireflies in every state except Hawaii. There are more east of the Mississippi and in the south generally, but anywhere with water has some (including river valleys in arid states).

I had to google this. If you count non-flashing bugs as fireflies, sure. Nothing like the typical experience in my backyard when I lived in Alabama. They are very different bugs.

Still, neat, to be sure. Indeed, my point in the original post was that I find the wildlife out here in the PNW to be very fun and I like all of the wildlife we have. Banana slugs, as a fun example.

How far north are you? We get them around Albany, NY. The big thing is having a forest-meadow boundary, where fallen leaves aren't removed. If you're surrounded by grass lawns & concrete where people rake & remove the leaves fireflies could lay their eggs in, you won't get fireflies.

Fair, it is not "north" that is my limiting factor. It is being in the Pacific North West. As another poster has said, we have some glowing bugs. Nothing like fireflies, though.

And I hasten to add, plenty of other amazing creatures.

Same deal when we "discover" new ruins in the Central American rainforests; the locals are often very aware of their existence.

Nice, looks tasty!

So, Kudzu?

Or Industrial waste like in France around 2012?

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/blue-and-green-hon...

And on Banggi, a Malaysian island, there is supposedly green honey!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361629042_Physicoch...

In NYC, they found red honey which was coming from bees drinking at a maraschino cherry factory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html

Unrelated, but that led to the police finding a marijuana grow operation in the basement:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/nyregion/secret-marijuana...

Perhaps this was not unrelated after all, as the bee detectives might have sensed the smell of the flowers.

The New Yorker article about it also has some additional details: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/23/the-maraschino...

An NC state professor previously determined it's aluminum reacting with acid in the bees' stomachs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46501058

any soft drink plants in the area? A bottler near where I used to stay got caught dumping out expired flavourant packs when honey in the area started turning red.

oh great... grape flavored honey...

From the article

>Flavour-wise, she says, "to my untrained palate, the honey really does taste purple, in a grape-y sort of way".

Oh no

Kudzu flowers supposedly have a grape like flavor. I just had a beer made with them from fonta flora in NC and you could vaguely taste it. Although unsure if it was my imagination.

Kudzu flowers were listed as one of the possibilities in the article.

It could still be placebo effect and/or whatever makes purple/red grapes their deep color having an influence on the flavor and this being common to both purples rather than spilled Fanta. The article mentions kudzu which is also purple and allegedly vaguely grape like.

Basically "this bloody mary sure does have a hint of pizza to it" but one level lower (chemical level rather than the tomato ingredient level).

A bit of digging, and it turns out there's a Coca-cola bottler in Aberdeen, the same area as Dees Bees Apiary. I'm willing to bet that purple honey coincides with grape Fanta spills or dumps

This famously happened with M&Ms

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/121011-bl...

During the peak of the Manuka honey bubble, people were supposedly spiking competitors honey by putting out coloured sugar water here in New Zealand.

Unsure if that’s true or just a rumour.

Yep, same happened near me before. Local beekeepers got some real dark colored rootbeer honey.

I seem to recall another story about colored honey (blue?) where the bees had been feeding on antifreeze - not recommended for eating.

Reminds me of the story about the red (and not great tasting) honey bees were making in Brooklyn... from sipping up liquid from the local maraschino cherry factory.

Which led to the discovery of a marijuana grow operation below the factory.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/nyregion/secret-marijuana...

Fun fact about North Carolina: Venus Fly Traps only grow naturally within about a 75-mile radius around Wilmington, NC.

There’s a hopefully unrelated concept called purple urine bag syndrome I have seen. Not completely understood either but this paper thinks due to a combination of dietary tryptophan breakdown from constipation and colonic E coli load, urinary bacteria, and reaction with the plastic tubing of the catheter and bag.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3894016/

Is there an M&M plant nearby???

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/05/162347192/the-last-word-in-bu...

Why hasn’t the honey been tested, if this has happened for such a long time?

I’d bet on some kind of contamination as others have already mentioned.

Yeah maybe time to send a sample to the “mass spec everything” guy

This guy, yeah?: https://www.youtube.com/@MassSpecEverything

The press love to write this "gee whiz" sort of story where nobody knows anything and everyone is baffled about everything isn't that just so amazing, but I'm sure the reason why the honey itself is purple is not a mystery and someone has tested it. The question is how the purple got into the honey, not what it is. It doesn't fit into the mystery storyline they want to write.

Any sort of science reporting is shot through with this sort of thing.

An NC State professor figured it out in the 1970s[^1]:

> At N.C. State University, Professor John Ambrose, an entomologist and assistant vice provost of undergraduate affairs and director of N.C. State’s First Year College program, performed a series of tests in the 1970s to pinpoint the source of the blue honey. The result: nothing is what it seems. [...]

> Ambrose concluded that some of that aluminum ended up in the flowers’ nectar, was transferred to the hive, then added to the bees’ acidic digestive fluid to make blue honey.

Unfortunately no one believes him and he's no longer around to defend himself:

> This story appeared in the April 2010 issue of Our State. Professor John Ambrose died in January 2015 after a short battle with brain cancer.

[^1]: https://www.ourstate.com/blue-honey/

The book "All the Colors of the Dark" has a plot line around rare purple honey being a sort of treasure map to a place in North Carolina. I thought it was an odd made-up plot point.

I guess it turns out it was not.

Despite not liking that part of the plot, it was a beautifully written book, that permanently changed some of my reading habit's.

Funny story: I came across some money and instead of buying Bitcoin (which at the time was selling for ~$30) I bought 6 big pails of honey from a local farm. Honey never goes bad, and during an economic collapse it would easily have the same value as Bitcoin.

I ended up eating all of it in a year instead.

I like honey pretty well, but I have no idea how I'd go through 6 pails of it a year. Did you use it in your coffee and also put it on toast every morning or something?

Yep. I have a sweet tooth.

Wasn't there also drug honey a few weeks ago?

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45803097

We also got blue honey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801032 ) and cannabis honey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11221651 )

These effects can arise from much more mundane sources.

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/05/162347192/the-last-word-in-bu...

Similarly: "The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook"

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html

https://archive.ph/vQkwl

And bees can also make radioactive honey:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/23/honey-nuclea...

Here's an article from 2010 I submitted a few years ago along with other links I was able to dig up at the time:

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

If it's in North Carolina, maybe it's Cheerwine.

Okay do a chemical analysis? I would want that done anyways to know if its safe eat depending on the chemical causing the color.

Just a couple days ago I was able to try white honey from Montana. I don’t believe there is any rarity to it but it was new to me and tasted great.

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