Blue borage honey
Clean, delicate and softly floral, with a thick smooth body that gives it more weight than its flavour would suggest.
New Zealand's quiet speciality, and a honey with a thoroughly misleading name — it is not borage at all, but viper's bugloss, a European weed that took over the dry braided riverbeds of the South Island and turned out to be one of the most productive nectar plants there. The honey is pale, thick, delicately floral and slow to set, and it is among the best everyday honeys the country produces.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- light blossom, clean wax, warm hay
- Flavour
- gentle floral, clean sweetness, a buttery body
- Finish
- Smooth and medium-length.
- Intensity
- Mild
- Sweetness
- Very sweet
- Bitterness
- None
- Acidity
- Low
Colour, texture and crystallisation
- Colour
- Extra white (8-17 mm Pfund)White (17-34 mm Pfund)Extra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)
Very pale straw with a faint green cast, and noticeably thick in the jar.
On setting: Sets slowly to a fine pale cream.
- Texture
- Thick but pourable; Runny; Soft set
- Crystallisation
Slow — months before it starts to granulate
Moderately fructose-leaning and slow to granulate, generally holding liquid for six months to a year and then setting finely.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 14.5–18% (typically 16.3%)
- Fructose
- 39–44% (typically 41.5%)
- Glucose
- 29–35% (typically 32%)
- Glucose-to-fructose ratio
- 0.68–0.86 (typically 0.77)
- pH
- 3.6–4.4 (typically 4)
- Electrical conductivity
- 0.1–0.35 mS/cm (typically 0.22 mS/cm)
These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey.
What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured
Where it comes from
- Floral source
- Echium vulgare, and in some districts the related Echium plantagineum. Both are European introductions and both are regarded as weeds in Australasia, which sits awkwardly beside the honey's quality.
- Origins
- The Mackenzie Country, Canterbury and Marlborough regions of New Zealand's South Island above all.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- December to February (southern hemisphere)
Southern-hemisphere summer, and unusually long for a single species — echium flowers in succession up the spike over many weeks.
- The bees
- Echium's exceptional nectar replenishment rate is the whole story — it refills quickly and keeps producing through the afternoon heat when most plants have stopped, which makes a stand of it extraordinarily productive per hectare.
- Usual processing
- Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set), Raw
An uncomfortable position comparable to Californian star thistle: echium is a listed weed across Australasia, toxic to horses and cattle in quantity, and simultaneously one of the most valuable nectar resources in the South Island high country. Both facts are true and neither cancels the other.
What to do with it
A very good everyday honey — mild enough for tea, thick enough for toast, and cheap enough in New Zealand to cook with.
At the tableSpreadingIn hot drinksBakingDessertsDressings
Pairings
- Toast and butter
Thick, mild and smooth — everything an everyday spreading honey should be.
- Fresh fruit and yoghurt
Adds sweetness and body without a competing flavour.
- Herbal tea
Mild enough not to erase a delicate infusion.
Pairing pages this honey appears on
Selected by this honey’s own recorded intensity, flavour families and uses rather than by anything written above — each page prints the rule that put it there.
Where this honey sits in the catalogue
Sources
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides that cover this honey
- Nectar plants explainedNectar is a payment. Understanding what the plant is buying, and how it controls the price, explains most of what flowers do and why some are useless to some bees.
- The best flowers for beesHerbaceous flowers rather than trees and shrubs, chosen for output and length of season. Most of them are things you can grow in a border or a container.
- Types of honey: how the catalogue actually dividesHoney is sorted four different ways at once — by floral source, by colour, by texture and by processing — and a jar label usually mixes them. Knowing which axis a word belongs to is most of what it takes to read one.
Tools for choosing and using honey
- Honey finder
Which honey should I buy for what I actually want to do with it?
- Flavour selector
I like this taste — which honeys have it?
- Honey comparison
How do these honeys actually differ, beyond colour?
- Honey substitute calculator
How much honey do I use instead of sugar, and what else has to change?
- Storage guide
How should I store honey, and what do I do when it sets?