Wow. What a week! The food safety bill was passed by the Senate, the long-awaited child nutrition/school food legislation is ready to be signed into law, and we had a lot of really intense debate over school food reform. I don’t know about you, but I’m completely tuckered out and ready for a little diversion.
So thank goodness reader SoKnitPicky reminded me of a story my husband had read aloud to me earlier this week, from the New York Times.
It’s about an an urban bee-keeper in Red Hook, Brooklyn who was puzzled to discover that her honeybees were returning to the hive with a bright red stripe on their bodies, instead of the usual amber, and that their honey was also alarmingly red. Eventually it was determined that the bees were gorging themselves on the Red Dye No. 40-colored syrup produced at a nearby marischino cherry factory. The bee-keeper — who is also a slow food activist — was dismayed that her bees weren’t content to feed on the local, natural nectar surrounding them, and seemed particularly distressed to learn how motivated the bees were to seek out their equivalent of junk food; some of her bees were being kept on Governors Island, which means they had to travel a considerable distance (in bee terms) across the water to get to the good stuff over in Red Hook.
As Susan Dominus, the writer of the piece, drolly observed:
It seems natural, by now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we ourselves had been genetically modified to choose artificially flavored strawberry candy over strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a piece of actual cheese. But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a betrayal to our sense of how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? Or, perhaps, not know enough to know better? . . . .
Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?
You can read the whole story here.
Have a great weekend, everyone! More Lunch Tray on Monday . . .
Renee says
My husband keeps bees. An acquaintance bee-keeper of ours feeds his bees sugar water all summer. Sugar-water is normally fed to bees once in the early spring (until the dandelions start to bloom here in northern Illinois) and then again once in late fall, just before the bees become dormant. But this guy feeds them sugar water all summer long, in order to pump up his honey production. We both find it more than a little weird that he’s harvesting honey that is actually made of sugar, rather than nectar and pollen. Why go to all that trouble to change sugar into honey?!
jenna Food w/ Kid Appeal says
i had to pick my jaw up off the floor when i read about beekeepers intentionally feeding bees HFCS. needless to say, i buy only local raw wildflower honey to avoid any HFCS masquerading as honey. who knows what those little cheap honey bears at the big box store are made from…