Reminds me of the "discovery" of synchronous fireflies in 1990:

>Scientists got wise to the presence of synchronous fireflies in the U.S. in the 1990’s, thanks to the efforts of Faust, a citizen naturalist. “Growing up in east Tennessee, we called them lightning bugs. They're just part of summer,” she says.

In the early 1990’s, Faust read an article in a science news magazine that said there were no synchronous fireflies in the Western Hemisphere. “I thought, ‘Ours are synchronous – who do I tell this to?’” she recalls.

She wrote a letter to researchers, who came to Tennessee and studied those fireflies for the next twenty years.

[src] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/g-s1-935/synchronous-fireflie...

There's a lot of stuff in the world that's unique and special, but isn't common knowledge on the internet. I think more people should go out and look around for themselves!

Nice, looks tasty!

So, Kudzu?

Or Industrial waste like in France around 2012?

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/blue-and-green-hon...

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/blue-and-green-hon...

And on Banggi, a Malaysian island, there is supposedly green honey!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361629042_Physicoch...

any soft drink plants in the area? A bottler near where I used to stay got caught dumping out expired flavourant packs when honey in the area started turning red.

Reminds me of the story about the red (and not great tasting) honey bees were making in Brooklyn... from sipping up liquid from the local maraschino cherry factory.

Fun fact about North Carolina: Venus Fly Traps only grow naturally within about a 75-mile radius around Wilmington, NC.

There’s a hopefully unrelated concept called purple urine bag syndrome I have seen. Not completely understood either but this paper thinks due to a combination of dietary tryptophan breakdown from constipation and colonic E coli load, urinary bacteria, and reaction with the plastic tubing of the catheter and bag.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3894016/

Is there an M&M plant nearby???

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/05/162347192/the-last-word-in-bu...

Why hasn’t the honey been tested, if this has happened for such a long time?

I’d bet on some kind of contamination as others have already mentioned.

The book "All the Colors of the Dark" has a plot line around rare purple honey being a sort of treasure map to a place in North Carolina. I thought it was an odd made-up plot point.

I guess it turns out it was not.

Despite not liking that part of the plot, it was a beautifully written book, that permanently changed some of my reading habit's.

Funny story: I came across some money and instead of buying Bitcoin (which at the time was selling for ~$30) I bought 6 big pails of honey from a local farm. Honey never goes bad, and during an economic collapse it would easily have the same value as Bitcoin.

I ended up eating all of it in a year instead.

Wasn't there also drug honey a few weeks ago?

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45803097

We also got blue honey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801032 ) and cannabis honey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11221651 )

These effects can arise from much more mundane sources.

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/05/162347192/the-last-word-in-bu...

Here's an article from 2010 I submitted a few years ago along with other links I was able to dig up at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32810786

And bees can also make radioactive honey:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/23/honey-nuclea...

Just a couple days ago I was able to try white honey from Montana. I don’t believe there is any rarity to it but it was new to me and tasted great.

If it's in North Carolina, maybe it's Cheerwine.

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