Prague, Oct 6 (CTK) – Beekeepers in the Mlada Vozice area, south Bohemia, are unhappy at their bees neglecting flowers and preferring feeding on fruit candies that a local producer keeps in sacks in a courtyard because the honey they make is distasteful and unsellable, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) wrote on Friday.
The honey the “choosy” bees produce has a greenish colour and it tastes like fruit candies.
Since the LHO Blanice distillery ended up bankrupt, 250 tonnes of sweet yeasting substances it has left unprocessed have been attracting bees from the wide surroundings, MfD writes.
“All beekeepers within the radius of four kilometres face the same trouble. The honey they produce is unsellable. No one is willing to buy it from them, since it consists of sugar with food coloring, additional substances and condiment. It tastes like Bon Pari [candy],” bee keeper Zdenek Brenda told the daily.
The beekeepers previously urged the producer to take steps to stop the trouble.
“They covered it [the sacks with sweet substances] with a tarp, but the mice bit it into pieces. Besides, a mere few-millimetre hole is enough for the bees to reach the candies,” Brenda said.
“When it rains, the candies “thaw” and flow from below the tarp. The situation is the worst in autumn and early spring. If dandelions, rapeseed or gardens eventually start blossoming nearby, the bees prefer them, but the honey they had collected before remains in the hive and devalues the high-quality honey,” Brenda said.
Vit Jungbauer, who is the distillery’s bankruptcy administrator, said he cannot do much about the problem.
“The sacks with the waste lie outside…I cannot hire a storage hall to deposit them in,” he is quoted as saying.
He said he hopes that the plant could be sold by the spring and the new owner could process the sweet substances. If the goal failed, the beekeepers are left with no other possibility than moving their bees farther away from the plant compound.
Brenda and his colleagues said it is unthinkable for them to move away the bees they keep near their houses.
The regional veterinary authority cannot help them either.
“We cannot impose any steps on a business company…We can intervene only if a beekeeper sold such honey on the market. If we uncovered such case, it would be a serious problem,” the authority director Frantisek Kouba said.
One of the beekeepers has such experience already. Last year, he was fined several thousand crowns for selling “candy” honey with more than permitted content of saccharose, MfD writes.
