LOL. I love this story and have been telling it here for the past five Halloweens.
BLUE HONEY
It happened around this time of year. About twenty-five years ago in Central Florida, an area thick with miles and miles of orange groves, word got out that bee keepers had been producing the most beautiful blue honey of confectionary quality. I’d never heard of Blue Honey. So, the following April I drove out there to see and smell the blossoming of the citrus orchards. It’s magnificent. The air fills with the sweet aroma of oranges for miles and miles. Along the roads there were old farmers selling their honey and, after hunting throughout the morning, I finally found one that had the rare Florida Blue. It really was beautiful to look at—crystal clear, ice-blue. I opened a jar and received a concentrated blast of the sweet smell of the orchards. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this before.
I asked the guy how it was produced. He said that back in the ‘50s his old man, a local citrus farmer, decided to branch out into vanilla. But pollination of the vanilla orchid is very difficult. It must be done during the short time that the vanilla orchid vine bears fruit, the vanilla bean, and requires the Melipona bee, found only in Mexico and Central America, to accomplish this.Otherwise, humans must pollinate each flower with small sticks and this is extremely labor-intensive and becomes very expensive. So, his dad smuggled in a few hives of Meliponas to pollinate his orchids. But the bees didn’t gather honey only from the vanilla, but also gathered it from the orange groves surrounding them. The result was this beautiful and delicious blue honey.
A couple of weeks later my local paper broke a story about Florida Blue Honey. The FDA had come down on the grover like a cluster bombThe man in the restaurant had been telling the truth and grover went to jail and lost his land in the legal process. The orchard I’d bought from was surrounded on three sides by a huge, new federal construction project and the blue in the honey was the result of the bees being attracted to the chemical in the hundreds of Port-O-Lets put out there for the workers to relieve themselves while on the job. The color of the disinfectant is blue, thus blue honey.
Interestingly, there were no recorded instances of people getting sick from this. But the idea still sends waves of nausea up from my gut whenever I think about it.