Jeanne Price has learned to love the wildy invasive kudzu vines that blanket so much of the South.

That’s because the honeybees she keeps at a Bostic, N.C., farm can’t resist the sweet purple kudzu blooms that fill the air with an aroma similar to that of grape Kool-Aid each August.

And Price can’t resist the delicately perfumed honey they make from those blossoms, harvesting 50 gallons of it a season.

Of course, that honey comes with a price.

“It’s not my favorite plant,” Price says of kudzu. “If I don’t check my bees for a week, it will cover the hives.”

Called by some the “vine that ate the South,” kudzu is the bane of the South, covering more than 7 million acres from the Carolinas to Texas and costing $500 million a year to control. And not all that successfully, at that.

But some people don’t fight kudzu. They eat it.

“It is perfectly valid as a food source,” says Regina Hines, a fiber artist in Ball Ground, Ga. “In the springtime, I like to gather the little shoots, and I will saute them with onions and mushrooms. They taste almost like snow peas.”

Related to peas, the climbing perennial was introduced to the South during the 1930s, when the government hired workers to plant it for erosion control.

The government paid farmers as much as $8 an acre to plant fields of the vine.

But when the vine began to smother their crops, farmers balked.

Soon, the vines were choking 100-foot-tall trees, pulling down telephone poles, clogging train tracks and covering parked cars.

Since 1953, when the government removed kudzu from its list of recommended cover crops, landowners and scientists have struggled to control it.

But kudzu can take years to successfully treat with herbicide. Its roots can run 10 feet deep.

Appalled by how much the government spends fighting kudzu, Juanitta Baldwin, who wrote the cookbook