Blue honey

Some bees in a region in northeastern France produce green bile because they eat sugar containing colored products.

From August to now, more than a dozen households raising honey bees around the town of Ribeauville in the Alsace region of France have found their bees brought to the heap of colorful substances. In addition, the honey they produce is blue and green, France 24 reports.

After the investigation, beekeepers discovered that, instead of sucking nectar, bees fly to a bio-gas production plant 4km away to suck sugar. This factory processes waste from a candy factory. The factory's candies are red, green, yellow, blue and brown. Because the bees suck sugar containing colored products, their honey has strange colors.

Alain Frieh, chairman of the town's Beekeepers Association, said green honey smells, tastes like regular honey. However, owners of bees do not dare sell them. The birth of this kind of bile makes their situation more difficult in the context of high rates of honey bees and the amount of nectar (bee's food) drastically reduced due to the previous harsh winter.

Agrivalor, which owns a biogas plant, insists it will try to find a solution to the problem after beekeepers announce the incident.

'We cleaned the containers and will store the waste in closed rooms , ' said Philippe Meinrad, a manager of Agrivalor.

The number of bees around the world has decreased quite rapidly over the past few years. So the French government banned people from using Cruiser OSR, a fairly common insecticide, to protect bees. A study has shown that Cruiser OSR is the leading cause of bee deaths.

Government data shows that France is one of the most honey producing countries in the European Union, with an output of about 18,330 tons per year.