A Little Purple Magic: Why I Can't Stop Thinking About North Carolina's Purple Honey

I need to tell you about something that's had me buzzing for the past week: purple honey.

Yes, purple. Not amber, not gold — actual violet-hued honey, and as far as anyone can tell, it only shows up naturally in one place on Earth: the coastal plain and Sandhills region of North Carolina. Right here. In our backyard.

Blye's Bees Purple Honey

I stumbled across this local treasure while scrolling through Instagram, and I have not been able to stop talking about it since. Blye’s Bees, a business owned by a couple with hives near Cary, NC, posted about their recently harvested honey and its rare hue. They had plans to bring it to the Downtown Cary Farmer’s Market, and I had high hopes of snapping up a jar for myself. It turns out I’m not the only one who had my interest piqued! Blye’s Bees sold out of their stock within a couple of hours of the market opening. I’m looking forward to the moment when I spot another post from a local beekeeper offering up a chance to buy their violet product! You might ask, “Other than the color, what makes this honey so special?”

Here's the thing that gets me: nobody actually knows for sure why it happens. Beekeepers have been pulling frames of this shimmering purple honey out of their hives for decades, and the leading explanations are still, essentially, educated guesses.

Some are quick to guess the color comes from bees feasting on blueberries. Researchers at NC State, including entomologist John Ambrose, pushed back on that one, stating “bees don't have the mouthparts to pierce fruit skin.” His team's tests pointed somewhere stranger: aluminum in the coastal plain's soil making its way into flower nectar, then reacting with the natural acids in a bee's stomach to produce that blue-purple tint. Sourwood nectar, when soaked overnight in the same digestive fluids, also turned purple in their trials. And yet plenty of longtime beekeepers still swear by kudzu blooms, or point to southern leatherwood as the real culprit.

Nobody has closed the case. And honestly? I hope they never fully do.

There's something delightful about the fact that a state insect (yes, the honey bee is officially ours) can still surprise the scientists who study it. We tend to think of agriculture as a solved problem — soil, seed, sun, water, done. But then you learn that somewhere between a kudzu vine and a bee's stomach acid, North Carolina is quietly producing a color of honey that shouldn't exist anywhere else in the world, and it's "highly sporadic" even within our own state. You can't farm it on purpose. You just have to hope your hive finds the right flowers in the right soil in the right season.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes agriculture endlessly fascinating to me. It's not just yield charts and planting calendars — it's an entire hidden layer of chemistry, biology, and local weirdness that we're still discovering, sometimes by accident.

If you're ever driving through the Sandhills or coastal plain and spot a roadside honey stand, take a look at what's in the jars. You might just catch a glimpse of one of North Carolina's genuine, unexplained little miracles — and a reminder of how much wonder is still hiding in the fields, forests, and hives around us.

Sources:

• A Sweet Mystery: Purple Honey in NC

• Purple honey: the genuine thing from North Carolina

• Yes, NC beekeepers have purple (and blue) honey — and that's an incredibly rare brag