Glossary

Honey made not from nectar but from the sugary excretions of sap-feeding insects, collected by bees from leaves and needles.

Honey deliberately crystallised under control, so the crystals stay fine and the texture stays smooth and spreadable.

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The reason honey must not be given to babies under twelve months old.

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Fermented honey and water — probably the oldest alcoholic drink humans made, and quite likely by accident.

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Honey still in the wax the bees built to hold it, sold and eaten as a whole.

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The idea that a place expresses itself in a product — and one of the few food categories where it is literally true.

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Spoilage of honey by naturally present yeasts, above roughly 20 per cent moisture.

A piece of comb suspended in a jar of liquid honey.

Squares of comb honey cut from an unwired frame and boxed.

Honey from Australian native stingless bees, gathered by Aboriginal people for millennia.

The use of hive products — honey, propolis, pollen, royal jelly, venom — for health purposes.

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The form of social organisation involving cooperative brood care, overlapping generations and a reproductive division of labour.

A bee in which each female builds and provisions her own nest alone, with no workers and no caste.

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A bee that collects pollen from only one plant family or genus.

A bee that collects pollen from a wide range of unrelated plants.

Vibrating a flower at a specific frequency to shake pollen out of anthers that will not release it otherwise.

Taking nectar by biting through the base of a flower rather than entering it, pollinating nothing.

A protein-rich secretion from the head glands of nurse bees, and the food that turns a larva into a queen.

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The figure-of-eight run by which a honey bee forager communicates the direction and distance of a food source.

Laying eggs in another bee's provisioned nest cell so the larva eats food it did not gather.

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The dense brush of hairs a female bee carries pollen on — on the hind legs in most bees, on the underside of the abdomen in the Megachilidae.

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The smooth concave pollen basket on the hind tibia of honey bees, bumblebees, stingless bees and orchid bees.

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Pollen packed into comb cells with honey and enzymes and lacto-fermented — what a colony actually eats, as opposed to what it collects.

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The mixture of wax and plant resin that stingless bees build with, in place of pure beeswax.

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The distinct forms within a social insect colony — in honey bees, queen, worker and drone.

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Producing female offspring from unfertilised eggs — the trick that makes the Cape honey bee a social parasite.

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The chemical signal by which a queen's presence and condition are known throughout a colony.

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A male honey bee. Cannot sting, cannot forage, and exists to mate.

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Mouth-to-mouth transfer of food between bees, and the colony's main information channel as well as its distribution system.

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A forager's habit of working one plant species per trip, even when others are available.

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A storage protein that makes a winter bee live four times as long as a summer one.

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How a colony holds its brood nest at 34-35 °C year-round — tighter than most mammals manage.

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A rippling wave that travels across the face of a giant honey bee nest, used to deter predators.

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A worker bee in the last phase of her life, collecting nectar, pollen, water or resin.

A young worker feeding larvae, at the age when her brood-food glands are at peak output.

Any worker doing work inside the nest rather than foraging.

A worker stationed at the entrance, checking the identity of every bee that enters.

A forager that searches for new forage or new nest sites rather than exploiting known ones.

A worker warming brood by pressing her thorax against capped cells or entering empty ones.

A specific patch of air where drones gather to wait for queens, used year after year.

The organ in which a queen stores sperm from her mating flights for the rest of her life.

The sex-determination system in which females come from fertilised eggs and males from unfertilised ones.

A group of workers in a colony sharing the same drone father.

Workers detecting and removing eggs laid by other workers.

The area of comb where the queen lays and the brood is reared, held at 34 to 35 °C.

The ball of bees a colony forms in cold weather, generating heat by shivering.

A physiologically distinct autumn-reared worker that lives five to six months rather than six weeks.

A young bee's first flights, learning what the hive entrance looks like and where it sits.

A chain of bees hanging leg to leg across a gap while comb is being built.

A scent gland on the abdomen used to guide nestmates to a location.

The glandular secretion nurse bees feed to larvae.

The head gland producing brood food, active in workers of about three to ten days old.

The tearing away of a worker's sting apparatus when she stings a mammal.

The scent released with a sting that recruits other bees to defend.

An artificial nesting structure of tubes or drilled wood for cavity-nesting solitary bees.

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A bee that nests in an existing hole rather than digging one.

A bee that excavates a burrow in soil — around seventy per cent of all bee species.

The crop in which a forager carries nectar, separate from her digestive gut.

One of eight abdominal glands secreting the wax scales a bee builds comb from.

A bee's folding tongue, whose length decides which flowers she can use.

Three simple eyes on top of a bee's head, detecting light intensity rather than images.

The indirect muscles that power a bee's wings and double as the colony's heating system.

The layer of plant resin bees line a nest cavity with.

How far a colony's bees will fly to collect — commonly around three kilometres.

Heating honey — typically to around 60-70 °C — mainly to delay crystallisation and ease filtering.

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Plant resin collected by bees and used to seal, sterilise and reinforce the nest.

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The wax secreted by young worker bees from abdominal glands and used to build comb.

A parasitic mite of honey bees, and the single greatest threat to managed colonies worldwide.

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A whole colony abandoning its nest and leaving, as distinct from swarming, which divides a colony in two.

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How a honey bee colony reproduces: the old queen leaves with much of the workforce to found a new nest, and the original colony raises a replacement queen.

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A small established colony on a few frames — a laying queen, brood, stores and bees — used to start or rescue a hive.

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The process by which bees convert nectar into honey — enzyme addition and water removal together.

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The wax seal bees place over a cell once the honey inside is ripe.

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The eggs, larvae and pupae of a colony, and the part of the nest a beekeeper reads first.

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A worker whose ovaries have developed in the absence of a queen, laying eggs that produce only drones.

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The 6 to 9 mm gap bees leave as a passageway and neither fill with comb nor seal with propolis.

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A hive design whose combs can be lifted out and replaced without damaging the colony.

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A coiled straw basket hive, used across northern Europe for centuries, with no internal structure to inspect.

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A site where hives are kept, and a set of decisions about siting rather than just a location.

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Keeping stingless bees — a tradition older than honey bee beekeeping in the Americas and quite unlike it.

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Taking honey from wild nests rather than kept colonies — the oldest form of the relationship, and still practised.

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The virus that varroa transmits, and the actual cause of most colony collapse attributed to the mite.

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A specific syndrome reported from around 2006 — adult bees vanishing from a hive that still held brood and stores.

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The instrument beekeepers use to measure honey's water content before extracting.

Honey squeezed from crushed comb rather than spun out.

Honey extracted centrifugally, leaving the comb intact for reuse.

Adding finely crystallised honey to liquid honey to control how it sets.

An enlarged vertical cell in which a new queen is reared.

A colony quietly replacing a failing queen without swarming.

A queen raised at short notice from a larva that was already being fed as a worker.

Bees from one colony stealing stores from another, usually during a dearth.

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Bees returning to the wrong hive in a closely spaced apiary.

Bees hanging in a mass on the outside of a hive on a hot day.

A microsporidian gut parasite of adult bees, visible only under a microscope.

A notifiable bacterial brood disease that forms spores lasting decades.

A bacterial brood disease that kills larvae before capping and is less persistent than its American namesake.

A fungal brood disease turning larvae into hard white mummies.

An African beetle that has spread worldwide and can destroy stored comb and honey.

The ability of workers to detect and remove diseased or parasitised brood.

A grid sized to let workers pass and keep the queen out of the honey supers.

A box of frames added above the brood nest for the bees to store surplus honey in.

The lower box of a hive, containing the brood nest and the colony's own stores.

The movable-frame hive design that made modern beekeeping possible.

A hive in which bees build comb downward from bars with no frame or foundation.

A cylinder of bark stripped from a tree and hung in the canopy, used across the miombo woodlands.

Slavic tree beekeeping — colonies kept in hollows cut into living pines.

Moving colonies between locations to follow successive nectar flows or pollination contracts.

Seasonal movement of hives up and down a mountain to follow the flowering front.

Artificially inseminating a queen to control which drones father her offspring.

A period with no nectar coming in, when colonies consume stores rather than build them.

The mite level at which a beekeeper intervenes rather than continues monitoring.

The sugar solution plants secrete to attract pollinators, and the raw material of honey.

Pollination by wind — the strategy of grasses and many trees, and the source of almost all hay fever.

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Pollination by insects — the strategy of most flowering plants, and the reason nectar exists at all.

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The gland that secretes nectar — usually inside a flower, and sometimes not.

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A nectar gland outside the flower — usually on leaves or stems, and usually there to hire ants.

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The timing of biological events through the year — when a plant flowers and when a bee emerges.

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The petals of a flower collectively, and — where they form a tube — the filter deciding which bees can feed.

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A pea-family flower whose lower petals form a keel that must be forced open — filtering visitors by strength rather than tongue length.

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The hinged mechanism in salvia flowers that swings the anthers down onto a visiting bee's back.

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An anther that releases pollen only through a small pore — requiring a bee that can vibrate it out.

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A cultivar bred with extra petals in place of stamens or nectaries — usually worthless to bees.

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Having male and female flowers on separate plants — so a garden needs both to get fruit.

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A plant's inability to set fruit with its own pollen — which is what makes insect pollination economically necessary.

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Two or three flower forms with styles and stamens at different heights, forcing cross-pollination between types.

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Markings that direct a pollinator to the reward, frequently in ultraviolet and invisible to us.

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A crop grown to be dug in rather than harvested — and the accidental origin of several major honeys.

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A period when a landscape offers little or nothing to bees, regardless of how good it is the rest of the year.

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Flowering heavily at intervals of several years rather than annually — which makes some honeys occasional by nature.

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A period when nectar is abundant enough for colonies to store a surplus.

A plant supplying the protein a colony's brood is built from.

The period during which a plant is in flower and available to pollinators.

Transfer of pollen between different plants of the same species.

A plant fertilising itself with its own pollen.

Fruit development without fertilisation, and therefore without pollination.

A cluster of flowers arranged on a single structure.

A flat-topped flower head of many small stalks arising from one point.

A dense head of many tiny florets that reads as a single flower — the daisy arrangement.

An unbranched flower spike whose flowers open progressively from the base upwards.

A hanging spike of tiny petal-less flowers, usually wind-pollinated but not always.

An underground woody swelling from which a plant resprouts after fire.

A plant that photosynthesises and also draws water and nutrients from another plant's roots.

A plant that colonises bare or disturbed ground first.

Transfer of pollen from anther to stigma, enabling a plant to set seed.

How much a crop's yield falls without animal pollination.

A crop whose pollen is only released by vibration, which honey bees cannot perform.

The property of setting to a gel at rest and becoming liquid again when stirred or shaken.

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The natural formation of glucose crystals in honey, turning it from liquid to solid.

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The proportion of glucose to fructose in a honey, and the main predictor of how quickly it will crystallise.

Microscopic identification of the pollen grains in honey, used to establish its botanical and geographic origin.

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A compound that forms slowly in honey as it ages and rapidly when it is heated, used as an indicator of freshness and overheating.

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An enzyme added to honey by bees, measured as an indicator that the honey has not been overheated.

The bee enzyme that splits sucrose into glucose and fructose, and the main reason honey is not simply concentrated nectar.

A measure of a honey's mineral content, used as the formal test separating honeydew honey from floral honey.

The compound responsible for manuka honey's non-peroxide antibacterial activity, and the number most manuka is priced on.

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The precursor compound in mānuka nectar that converts to methylglyoxal as the honey matures.

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A trisaccharide found in honeydew honey that crystallises so readily it can set solid inside the comb.

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The proportion of water in a food that is free rather than bound to sugars — the measure that explains why honey does not spoil.

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A group of neurotoxins from Rhododendron nectar that make so-called mad honey genuinely poisonous.

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The percentage of water in honey, and the single figure that decides whether it will keep.

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A solution holding more dissolved solid than it should be able to — the state honey exists in permanently.

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A bee-added enzyme that slowly generates hydrogen peroxide and acid in honey.

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The antibacterial effect that nearly all honey shows in the laboratory, produced by hydrogen peroxide.

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A compound found in Leptospermum nectar and used as an authenticity marker for manuka honey.

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Sugars built from several linked units, found in honeydew honey and largely absent from nectar honey.

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Plant compounds that carry into honey and account for most of its colour, bitterness and measured antioxidant capacity.

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The enzymatic splitting of sucrose into glucose and fructose — what makes honey chemically different from nectar.

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The public health category honey falls into, alongside table sugar and fruit juice.

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A measure of how quickly a food raises blood glucose — and a poor guide to comparing sweeteners.

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The compound behind the smell of new-mown hay, and the vanilla note in sweet clover honey.

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Plant compounds that are toxic to the liver and can carry into honey in trace amounts.

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The sweeter of honey's two principal sugars, and the one that keeps honey liquid.

The less soluble of honey's two main sugars, and the one that crystallises out.

Table sugar; the sugar in nectar that bees convert into glucose and fructose.

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A rare sugar abundant in stingless bee honey and barely present in honey bee honey.

The dominant acid in honey, produced from glucose by a bee-added enzyme.

A measure of acidity; honey sits between 3.5 and 4.5, which is one reason it keeps.

Drawing and holding water from the air — the property that lets honey spoil if left open.

Resistance to flow; honey's viscosity roughly doubles for every five to seven degrees of cooling.

Antibacterial activity that survives when honey's hydrogen peroxide is neutralised.

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The standard test for cane and corn syrup added to honey.

Sugar from cane or maize, detectable in honey by its carbon isotope signature.

A broad compositional fingerprint used to check honey authenticity and origin.

The browning reaction between sugars and amino acids that darkens honey with age and heat.

Becoming less viscous when stirred or agitated.

Sugar added to food plus that naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juice.

The study of pollen in honey, used to identify floral and geographic origin.

A protein that speeds up a specific chemical reaction without being consumed by it.

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A compound that slows oxidation reactions — in a test tube, which is where the measurement is made.

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A family of laboratory methods that separate a mixture into its components so each can be measured.

Honey that has not been pasteurised and has been filtered no more finely than is needed to remove wax and debris.

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Honey in which one plant species dominates the nectar, and therefore the colour, aroma and flavour.

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Honey with no single dominant floral source.

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Fine filtration under pressure that removes pollen along with other particles.

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Adding sugar syrup to honey, or misdeclaring its origin — one of the most common forms of food fraud worldwide.

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Marketing words with essentially no regulatory content on a honey jar.

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A licensed, audited grading system for mānuka honey that tests four chemical markers plus authenticity, rather than methylglyoxal alone.

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An in-vitro antibacterial rating benchmarked against phenol, used chiefly to market Australian jarrah and other eucalypt honeys.

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Removing particles from honey after extraction, on a scale from coarse straining to pollen removal.

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Combining honeys from several crops or countries to produce a consistent product.

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Honey from one place, one season and usually one floral source.

The international food standard that defines what honey legally is.

The European law defining honey, its composition limits and its labelling rules.

A legal protection tying a food name to a place and a method of production.

A looser origin protection than a PDO, requiring one production stage in the named place.

The plant a honey was made from, and the single largest determinant of what it tastes like.

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The ability to follow a honey back through the supply chain to where it was harvested.

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A binding legal definition of what a food must be to be sold under a particular name.

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The standard instrumental scale for honey colour, running from water white to dark amber and reported in millimetres.

The compound responsible for the smell of almond extract, and the marzipan note in cherry and almond honeys.

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The palest grade on the Pfund colour scale — below 8 mm.

The darkest grade on the Pfund colour scale — above 114 mm.

Assessed by the senses — appearance, aroma, taste and texture.

A group of related aroma and taste characters used to classify honeys.

How long a honey's flavour lasts after swallowing.

The physical sensation of honey in the mouth, separate from its taste.

A drying, puckering sensation caused by tannins and related compounds.

A compound light enough to evaporate at room temperature and therefore to be smelled.

Smelling from inside the mouth — aroma travelling up the back of the throat while eating.