ISRAEL: On Jewish New Year's Eve an Israeli expert presents blue, purple and Green all-natural honey

Israelis who wish to welcome the new Jewish year by dipping an apple in a bawl of honey, one of the main holiday costumes, will be able to choose between a new range of colours of one of the most ancient foods in the world. At the foot of the holy Mount Tabor in the lower Galilee, amid orchards and fields, an Israeli insect expert says she developed a unique all-natural honey in six different colours: Blue, purple, green, red, pink and yellow. After months of planning, Malka Ben Ze'ev, the owner of 'Dvorat Hatavor' bee farm (Hebrew for 'Hatabor Bee') managed to produce the coloured honey, using only natural dyes. She explains that during the winter, when the bees do not fetch for nectar, she feeds them with old honey mixed with a concentrate made of herbs which were produced from the colourful wild flowers of Mount Tabor. The result is a naturally-made coloured honey. "I'm taking natural colours that are made from the wild flowers of Mount Tabor, I am boiling them until I have a very concentrated colour. I'm putting it with drops into the old honey and I'm giving it to the bees to eat it. More of it, I don't know because the process is by the bees. And later on we are getting very light, but colourful, colours of honey," she says. Later on she strengthens the colours by adding more concentrate to the produced honey. Ben Ze'ev says she came up with this idea in order to try to colour the New Year's dinner table. "I was looking for something special because we have a lot of kinds of honey here in Israel, of natural honey. But nobody has colourful honey and now, especially for Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year), I was looking for a new gimmick for the dinner table of Rosh Hashana, and then I was thinking why not colourful honey, it goes well with the apples (in which) we are putting the honey inside." But due to the long production process this year Ben Ze'ev will sell only three kinds of coloured honey: Blue, purple and green. The rest of the colours will wait for the next 'Rosh Hashana', Hebrew for 'head of the year'. The farm contains 120 beehives which are located on Mount Tabor, one of the holiest sites of Christianity, revered as Jesus's place of transfiguration. As a result the farm has become a pilgrimage for Christians who tour Israel's Galilee. In addition to honey, the farm specialises in silk production. Both products are created by natural processes, as it has been done since biblical times, Ben Ze'ev says. Located in the village of Shadmot Dvorah, the boutique farm features a small museum and live demonstrations of milk and honey productions. Ben Ze'ev claims that the fact that a stray bee chooses to eat from a bawl of green-coloured honey, proves that the honey was pure, natural and very concentrated. "The bee came to the green honey - which means that the honey is pure natural and all the dyeing is natural. otherwise the bee would not come to eat it, because animals know exactly what is natural and what is not," she says. Nevertheless, Ben Ze'ev recommends using the colourful honey as a holiday decoration and keep consuming pure non-colour, non-added honey during the rest of the year. On Friday (September 22) at sunset Jews will begin celebrating 'Rosh Hashana', the Jewish New Year, to remember the creation of the world. September 22 sunset marks the beginning of the year 5767 and the month of 'Tishri'. New Year's tradition of apples dipped in honey symbolises the hope for a "sweet year" ahead.

ITN Source | September 23, 2006

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