Blueberry honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

blueberry skin, green leaf, warm caramel, faint floral

Flavour

tart berry, light caramel, a green astringency, buttery base

Finish

Bright and slightly drying.

Intensity

Moderate

Sweetness

Sweet

Bitterness

Trace

Acidity

Bright

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Extra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)toLight amber (50-85 mm Pfund)toAmber (85-114 mm Pfund)

Light amber with a warm reddish cast, darker in lowbush crops than in highbush.

On setting: Sets to an opaque tan with a slightly grainy look.

Texture

Runny; Thick but pourable; Soft set

Crystallisation

Moderate — granulates over a few months

Granulates over a few months with medium crystals, so a set jar can read as slightly grainy rather than smooth. Warming gently restores it; boiling it does not.

Typical composition

Moisture

16–19% (typically 17.5%)

Fructose

38–43% (typically 40%)

Glucose

30–35% (typically 32.5%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.75–0.92 (typically 0.82)

pH

3.6–4.3 (typically 3.9)

Electrical conductivity

0.2–0.5 mS/cm (typically 0.32 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

Mainly lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) in Maine and the Maritimes, and highbush (V. corymbosum) further south. Both are Ericaceae, the heather family.

Origins

Maine, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec for lowbush; Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington for highbush.

Origin pages

• North America
• United States
• Canada
• Pacific Northwest
• Great Lakes

Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.

Harvest

May to June (northern hemisphere)

Short and early — two to three weeks, at a point in the year when colonies are still building and may consume much of what they collect.

The bees

Blueberry flowers are narrow-mouthed bells that release pollen best under buzz pollination — a vibration honey bees cannot produce. Bumblebees and some solitary bees can, which is why blueberry growers increasingly buy bumblebee colonies alongside honey bee hives. The honey bee is a competent nectar gatherer here and a mediocre pollinator, and the crop's yield reflects it.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Filtered, Raw

Blueberry honey exists because pollination contracts exist. Beekeepers are paid to place hives, and the honey is a secondary return — in a cold spring the colonies eat all of it and there is no crop at all.

What to do with it

Good on anything dairy and good in a vinaigrette, where its acidity is an asset rather than a complication. It is also one of the better honeys for baking with fruit, because the berry note survives moderate heat better than a floral perfume would.

At the tableDrizzlingDessertsBakingDressingsWith cheese

Pairings

• Greek yoghurt and granolaClassic

  The honey's tartness lines up with the yoghurt's rather than fighting it, so the dish reads as fruit rather than as sugar.

• Goat cheese

  Acid against acid, with the honey supplying the fruit the cheese lacks.

• Pork and game glazes

  A fruit-forward honey behaves like a fruit jelly in a glaze, which is the traditional accompaniment anyway.

History and traditional use

Wild lowbush blueberry has been harvested in the northeast for millennia, but blueberry honey is a modern product of managed pollination at scale. It is the clearest everyday example of the shift the pollination guides describe: a honey that is no longer the point of keeping the bees.