Why some honeys are rare

The five causes of scarcity

1. 1A very short flowAcacia flowers for about ten days. A late frost or a wet fortnight removes an entire national crop, and there is no second chance until next year.
2. 2A restricted plant rangeLeatherwood grows only in western Tasmania. Dzidzilché grows in Yucatán dry forest. The plant defines the maximum possible supply and nothing can increase it.
3. 3Irregular floweringEucalypts and many Australian trees flower heavily one year and barely at all for the next two. Yapunyah flowers after flooding, which may be years apart.
4. 4Low yield per colonyStingless bees produce around a litre a year. No amount of demand changes the biology.
5. 5Difficult extractionThixotropic honeys such as heather cannot be spun conventionally. Kiawe sets in the comb before it can be extracted at all.

Honeys whose supply is genuinely unpredictable

Rarity that is getting worse

Several honeys in this catalogue are becoming scarcer for reasons that are not cyclical. Ohia lehua forest is being killed by a fungal disease. Manuka, kanuka and pohutukawa face myrtle rust in New Zealand. Californian chaparral honeys have declined with fire frequency. Yemeni sidr and samar supply has been disrupted by war.

What to do about it

• Buy when you see it. A honey with a ten-day flow is not restocked on demand.
• Ask what year it was harvested. Good producers will say.
• Treat a permanently available scarce honey with suspicion.
• Learn a substitute. If leatherwood is unavailable, a strong eucalypt honey covers some of the same ground.

Rarity and the temptation to substitute

Scarcity and reputation together create the conditions for substitution, and the honeys most often misrepresented are precisely those that combine a famous name with a supply that cannot meet demand. This is not a matter of suspicion but of arithmetic: where a region produces a few tonnes a year and the market offers hundreds, most of what is on offer is something else.

The defences are unglamorous and they work. Pollen analysis identifies the floral source of a honey directly. Stable isotope testing detects added cane or corn syrup. Protected designations of origin make misuse of a regional name a legal matter rather than a commercial judgement. None of these is available to a shopper in a supermarket aisle, which is why buying scarce honey from a producer or a specialist rather than from a marketplace listing is the single most useful precaution.

• Ask for the harvest year and the region, not the country.
• Prefer sellers who publish batch testing for honeys where testing exists.
• Treat permanent availability of a seasonal honey as information.
• Accept that a genuinely scarce honey will sometimes simply not be available.