Field maple honey
Fresh and faintly green with a warm caramel base — a spring honey with rather more body than its colour suggests.
A spring honey from the only maple native to Britain, and one of the more useful hedgerow trees for bees precisely because nobody notices it flowering. The greenish flowers open with the leaves in April and yield heavily for a fortnight, which lands exactly when a colony is expanding hardest.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- green sap, warm hay, beeswax
- Flavour
- light caramel, green stem, malt, faint vanilla
- Finish
- Medium, warm and clean.
- Intensity
- Moderate
- Sweetness
- Sweet
- Bitterness
- None
- Acidity
- Moderate
Colour, texture and crystallisation
- Colour
- Extra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)Light amber (50-85 mm Pfund)
Pale gold with a distinctly greenish cast when fresh.
On setting: Sets pale and fine, losing the green tint.
- Texture
- Runny; Soft set; Creamed
- Crystallisation
Fast — granulates within weeks
A glucose-leaning spring honey that sets within weeks. Most maple honey reaches the customer creamed for that reason.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 16–19% (typically 17.5%)
- Glucose-to-fructose ratio
- 1–1.2 (typically 1.1)
- pH
- 3.8–4.4 (typically 4.1)
These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Ranges typical of European spring tree honeys. Field maple is rarely separated in published compositional work.
What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured
Where it comes from
- Floral source
- Acer campestre, generally worked alongside sycamore and Norway maple where all three occur, so the honey is frequently a maple blend rather than a single species.
- Origins
- Hedgerow and woodland-edge landscapes across western and central Europe.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- April to May (northern hemisphere)
A compressed spring flow that coincides with maximum brood rearing, so a surplus is only taken from strong colonies.
- The bees
- Small greenish flowers with fully exposed nectaries, held in upright clusters. Nothing is excluded, and the trees hum audibly for the fortnight they are open.
- Usual processing
- Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set)
Frequently blended into a spring hedgerow honey rather than separated, because field maple, sycamore and hawthorn overlap.
What to do with it
A good everyday honey — enough body for tea, enough set for toast, and cheap enough to bake with where it is produced.
At the tableSpreadingBakingIn hot drinksDesserts
Pairings
- Buttered toastClassic
Sets soft and spreads cleanly, which is most of what a breakfast honey needs to do.
- Young Gouda
The honey's caramel meets the cheese's nuttiness without either having to shout.
- Rhubarb
A warm honey against a very sharp fruit, added after cooking so the fresh green note survives.
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
History and traditional use
Field maple was a standard hedgerow and pollard tree across lowland England and northern France for centuries, valued for firewood and for its fine timber. The bee value was a by-product nobody was recording.
Sources
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Tools for choosing and using honey
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