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M&M Multicolored Honey Produced by French Bees

By S.C. Stringfellow | Update Date: Oct 06, 2012 01:03 PM EDT

Heinz ketchup company learned a very valuable lesson when in October 2000 they began to manufacture colored ketchup ranging from green and purple to orange and blue. However sales of their multicolored condiment plummeted as they realized people could not stomach consuming what they knew to be a tomato paste at a color that was anything other then red.

But it is not like Heinz used blue and green tomatoes to make the paste, rather simple food colorings to change it from the familiar red to the unappealing rainbow of colors.

Unlike Heinz's purposeful development of colored ketchup, french bee keepers are experiencing a phenomenon that seems entirely unnatural and is in fact caused by humans.

According to a report by Reuters, since August, beekeepers near the town of Ribeauville, in the northeastern region of Alsace, France, have been reporting their bees are producing blue and green honey, which the keepers trace to waste produced by a nearby M&M candy factory.

The bees, the report explains, are feeding on the colored, sugary waste product from the plant and producing honey that is blue and green in color.

France is one of the largest producers of honey in the wold, generating over 18,330 tons of the sticky sweetener a year. Coupled with a decrease in bee populations that has been steadily rising over the past years, bees are using alternative sources of sugar to produce honey, though it is rough on the life and breeding cycle of local plants.

"Bees are clever enough to know where the best sources of sugar are, if there are no others available," Gill Maclean, a spokesperson for the British Beekeepers' Association, told the BBC, as quoted by Times.

Despite the fact that sources report the new colored honey does in fact taste like normal honey, for french bee keepers the tainted product is "not honey" and refuse to market it.

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