Cotton honey
Mild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
A pale, mild honey from a crop nobody grows for nectar, and an unusual one in that much of it never comes from a flower at all. Cotton carries extrafloral nectaries — nectar glands on the leaves and bracts, outside the flower entirely — which secrete throughout the growing season and are worked by bees alongside the blossom. The result is a light, clean, fast-setting honey produced in quantity across the cotton belts of the world.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- green leaf, warm hay, clean wax
- Flavour
- clean sweetness, a faint vegetal edge, light butter
- Finish
- Short and clean.
- 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)
Pale straw to light gold, clear and bright.
On setting: Sets to a fine pale cream.
- Texture
- Runny; Soft set; Creamed
- Crystallisation
Fast — granulates within weeks
Glucose-leaning and quick to granulate, generally within a couple of months, with fine crystals.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 15–18.5% (typically 16.8%)
- Fructose
- 36–41% (typically 38.5%)
- Glucose
- 33–38% (typically 35.5%)
- Glucose-to-fructose ratio
- 0.88–1.04 (typically 0.94)
- pH
- 3.7–4.5 (typically 4.1)
- Electrical conductivity
- 0.15–0.45 mS/cm (typically 0.28 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
- Gossypium hirsutum principally. The extrafloral nectaries evolved to recruit ants as bodyguards against herbivores, and honey bees are opportunists exploiting a system built for something else.
- Origins
- Texas, Mississippi, Arizona and California; India, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Brazil and Australia.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- June to September (northern hemisphere)
A long window, because the extrafloral nectaries secrete for much of the growing season rather than only during bloom.
- The bees
- Cotton is largely self-pollinating, so the relationship is one-sided — the bees gain far more than the crop does, though bee visitation does raise yields modestly. The serious complication is chemical: cotton is among the most heavily insecticide-treated crops in the world, and pesticide exposure is a real and recurring problem for colonies working it.
- Usual processing
- Spun (centrifugally extracted), Filtered, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set), Coarsely strained
Largely sold blended rather than as a named type. Its interest is biological rather than gastronomic: it is the clearest common example of honey made substantially from extrafloral nectar.
What to do with it
A general-purpose honey with nothing to lose in an oven. It is one of the honeys most likely to be inside an unlabelled blend.
At the tableSpreadingBakingIn hot drinksSauces
Pairings
- Biscuits and plain baking
Sweetness without character, which is what a strongly flavoured recipe wants.
- Tea
Dissolves easily and adds nothing that would compete.
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
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.
- 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?