As expected, various samples of fruits, nuts, and other foods revealed very faint traces of cesium-137 when measured with a gamma detector, but even Kaste wasn’t prepared for what happened when he ran the same test with a jar of honey from a North Carolina farmer’s market.

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Traces of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s can still be found in American honey, new research reveals.

The radioactive isotope identified, cesium-137, falls below levels considered to be harmful – but the amounts measured nonetheless emphasize the lingering persistence of environmental contaminants in the nuclear age, even a half-century after international bomb tests ended.

“There was a period in which we tested hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere,” lead researcher Jim Kaste, an environmental geochemist at William & Mary university in Williamsburg, Virginia, explained last year in comments about the research.