I've never seen this occur before. The database query to insert an option in the database should not need to run for that long. There may be something that is blocking the execution of the query. Do any of the other inserts/edits on your site time out like this? Can you check the permissions on the user for connecting to the database?
One other thing you can try is to insert directly into the database and check if the options show up. You would add the option group name (Colors) to the ps3_optiongroups table as the OptionGroupName and the id can just be 1. In the ps3_options table, you can set the optionID to 1, the OptionGroupID to 1 and the OptionName to B10. Then in the ps3_productoptions table, set everything to 1, except the ProductID which you should look in the ps3_products table to find the ProductID to use.