Weekend Diversion: Funny Honey (Synopsis)

“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M’s and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.” -Dave Barry

They say that the milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand, but the colored candy shell will seriously melt pretty much on anything even close to body temperature. As Great Lake Swimmers would sing, it's pretty difficult to avoid the

Changing Colours.

Image credit: Jenefur (presumably of her 3-year-old daughter) of http://jenefur.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/mms/. Image credit: Jenefur (presumably of her 3-year-old daughter) of http://jenefur.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/mms/.

But what if you're a bee? Under normal circumstances, your senses would lead you to the nectar at the hearts of flowers, and you'd return to your hive with plenty of nutrients to produce honey. Also, you'd be covered in pollen while you did that, much of which would wind up in the honey as well.

Image credit: http://beesweetnaturals.com/, © 2014. Image credit: http://beesweetnaturals.com/, © 2014.

Go and see what happens to honey when M&Ms become a bee's primary food source instead.

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Is it recorded anywhere that these artificial sources within range of the hive reduce the pollination of our food supply? [I read that 70% of our food supply depends on bee pollination]

By Michael Fisher (not verified) on 18 May 2014 #permalink

I went to Friedrichshafen in Germany many years ago, and I was fascinated by a jelly bean machine which a storekeeper had outside his store. I doubt that he was selling many jelly beans, because bees from a neighbouring hive had somehow worked out how to get into the machine. And were consuming the jelly beans (there were a large number of half eaten beans on the top).

I think bees are able to chew if needed. And that bees are also attracted by colour in addition to scent.

By Wayne Robinson (not verified) on 18 May 2014 #permalink

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Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell is so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.