Bees Near M&M Waste Plant are Making Blue and Green Colored Honey

Blues and greens might look good in a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal or a handful of peanut M&Ms. It’s not very attractive when it comes to honey.

At least that’s how one beekeeper in northeastern France described trying to sell his strange stock of multicolored honey, according to the BBC News.

Last August, some beekeepers located in Alsace, France noticed that their bee colonies were producing  unusual colors of honey that ranged from light and dark blues and greens and even very dark red colors. They also saw the nectar they were drinking to produce the honey left unusual color stains on their honeycombs.

Color variations of the honey that bees produce naturally aren’t an anomaly since they often come in yellow, white and even black. Blue, green and red, however, are not among natural honey’s usual shades and they don’t sell very well.

The beekeepers banded together and tracked their colonies to see if they were feeding on anything unusual. Their search led them to a plant that disposes waste products for the Mars Corporation, the company that produces M&Ms candies. Plant officials said the bees were feeding off of the waste products that are used to dye M&Ms in different colors. They started moving their waste products inside the plant to places where the bees can’t get to them once they learned of the problem.