08/14/2026
In 2012, beekeepers in northeastern France opened their hives and found something they had never expected:
Blue and green honey.
At first, nobody knew what was happening. Honey can vary from almost transparent to very dark depending on the flowers bees visit, but bright blue and green definitely aren't normal.
So the beekeepers started investigating.
The answer was about 4 km away.
A local biogas facility near Ribeauvillé was processing waste from a Mars candy factory, including remnants from the production of M&M’S.
Some of this sugary, brightly colored material was accessible to the bees.
And from a honey bee's perspective, this makes perfect sense.
Foraging bees aren't searching specifically for flowers. They're searching for profitable sources of sugar. If they discover a concentrated and easily accessible sugar source, they can recruit other bees from the colony to it.
So instead of collecting only nectar, some of these bees were visiting the candy waste, carrying the colored sugary material back to their colonies.
The result was honeycombs filled with bizarre shades of blue and green.
It looked fascinating, but the beekeepers weren't celebrating. The product couldn't be sold as normal honey, and the incident showed just how easily human food waste can influence honey bee foraging.
Once the source was identified, the facility changed how the candy waste was stored, keeping it covered and inaccessible to the bees.
It is a great reminder of something important about honey bees:
They are incredibly good at finding sugar. They don't care whether we intended that sugar for them or not.