Why honeys taste and look so different

The 20% that does all the work

The sugar content of honey barely varies. Acacia and chestnut are both roughly four-fifths sugar, and if sugar were the whole story they would be near-identical. They are not remotely alike, because the last fifth — water, organic acids, minerals, amino acids, phenolic compounds and a few hundred volatile aroma molecules — comes directly from the plant and varies enormously.

Those volatiles are the reason lavender honey smells of lavender. Nectar carries a small quantity of the plant's own aromatic chemistry, and some of it survives ripening intact. In most honeys this produces a suggestion of the flower; in a few — lavender, orange blossom, leatherwood — it comes through almost unmistakably.

Where colour comes from

Honey colour tracks mineral content and phenolic compounds, both of which come from the plant. Buckwheat, chestnut, heather and honeydew honeys are dark because they are rich in both; acacia and rapeseed are pale because they are not. Electrical conductivity, which measures mineral content, is used as a formal test precisely because it tracks this so closely.

Colour also deepens with age and with heat, through the same browning reactions that darken any sugar solution. A very dark supermarket honey may be dark because of what the bees collected, or because of how it was processed and how long it has been in a warehouse — the label will not distinguish them.

Why the same honey differs year to year

• Weather during the flow. Nectar secretion is far more weather-sensitive than flowering, so a plant can be in full bloom and yielding almost nothing.
• What else was flowering. No monofloral honey is pure, and the supporting cast changes.
• Soil and geology, which alter the mineral content of the nectar and so the honey.
• Subspecies and colony differences, and how long the honey sat in the comb before extraction.
• Processing. Heat and fine filtration remove volatiles and pollen, which is why the same honey can taste noticeably duller after commercial handling.

This is why HoneyHQ records physical properties as ranges rather than figures. A single number for the moisture content of thyme honey would be describing one jar and implying all of them.