Waxy honey
Beeswax and pollen. Common in fast-setting field-crop honeys.
17 honeys · flavour family
Honeys in this group
- Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
- Sainfoin honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and softly floral with a distinct rose-and-hay note, and a thickness that gives it more presence than its flavour alone would.
- Gallberry honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral warmth and a faint bitterness on the finish that the name hints at without quite delivering.
- Sweet clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, sweet and hay-like with a soft vanilla note that is genuinely there rather than imagined — the clearest coumarin character of any common honey.
- Chinese tallow honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint waxy note — an unremarkable flavour attached to a very remarkable ecological situation.
- Sunflower honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStraw, beeswax and pollen, with a slightly waxy mouthfeel and a fresh, faintly herbal edge.
- Wildflower honeyExtra white · ModerateVaries with the season and the landscape. Pale spring crops are floral and light; late-summer crops darker, fruitier and stronger.
- Alfalfa honeyExtra white · MildMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
- Meadow honeyExtra light amber · ModerateSoft, warm and floral with a hay-and-clover base — recognisably a summer field, and gentler and less resinous than mountain honey.
- Cotton honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
- Willow honeyExtra white · MildMild, faintly green and quick to set. A spring honey in the literal sense, and one most beekeepers taste and few buyers ever see.
- Field maple honeyExtra light amber · ModerateFresh and faintly green with a warm caramel base — a spring honey with rather more body than its colour suggests.
- Karakovan honeyLight amber · ModerateComplex, floral and herbal at once, eaten with the wax. Its character is a mountain and a year rather than a species.
- Hedgerow honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWarm, floral and slightly grassy, with a caramel base. A good hedgerow honey is a genuinely complex thing that happens not to have a Latin name.
- Coconut blossom honeyExtra white · MildLight, clean and mildly waxy with a faint nuttiness. It tastes nothing like coconut, which surprises almost everyone.
- Prairie honeyWater white · MildClean, mild and creamy, with a light floral sweetness. The reference point for what a great many people think honey tastes like.
- Five finger honeyExtra white · MildMild, faintly green and slightly waxy, setting hard and pale. A working honey rather than a prestige one.
Plants behind these honeys
- White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
- SainfoinOnobrychis viciifoliaAn outstanding forage plant on both counts, and one of the few that performs in a dry summer when white clover has stopped.
- Sweet cloverMelilotus officinalisVery high nectar over a long dry-season window, and shallow enough florets that honey bees can work it properly — which alfalfa, growing in the same fields, will not allow.
- HawthornCrataegus monogyna
- BrambleRubus fruticosusThe combination of a very long season, high nectar value and reliability in variable weather makes bramble the workhorse of northern European summer forage.
- AlfalfaMedicago sativaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
- Wildflower meadowMixed native floraThe highest combined forage value of anything in this catalogue, because of diversity and duration rather than any single plant's output.
- DandelionTaraxacum officinaleThe pollen is what makes it critical. It arrives when colonies are expanding fastest and have the least in reserve, and bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation depend on early sources like this one to found a nest at all.
Guides covering these honeys
- Why honey crystallisesGranulation is not spoilage, not a sign of adulteration, and not evidence that honey is raw. It is glucose doing what glucose does — and the rate is predictable from the sugar ratio.
- Honey authenticity, adulteration and testingHoney is among the most adulterated foods in world trade. The tests are good, the evasions are better funded, and almost every home test circulating online does not work.
- Raw, filtered and processed honeyWhat actually happens between the hive and the jar, which of it changes the honey, and why the word 'raw' carries less information than it appears to.
- Creamed, set and whipped honeyCreamed honey has nothing added and nothing whipped into it. It is ordinary honey whose crystallisation has been controlled instead of left to chance, and the technique is a hundred years old.
- What is honey?Honey is nectar that bees have concentrated and chemically altered, then sealed in wax. Every property people notice about it — the sweetness, the keeping quality, the setting — follows from that process.
- What makes a honey mildMild honeys are pale, low in minerals and dominated by sweetness. They are the right answer far more often than the honey world tends to admit.
Other flavour family groups
Narrow it down further
- 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?