Five finger honey
Mild, faintly green and slightly waxy, setting hard and pale. A working honey rather than a prestige one.
Whauwhaupaku
New Zealand's winter honey, from a common small tree of forest margins and regenerating scrub. It is a relative of ivy, and like ivy its entire value rests on flowering when nothing else does.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- green leaf, beeswax, faint blossom
- Flavour
- clean sugar, green stem, beeswax, faint caramel
- Finish
- Short and clean.
- Intensity
- Mild
- Sweetness
- Sweet
- Bitterness
- None
- Acidity
- Moderate
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, sometimes with a faint green cast.
On setting: Sets almost white and fine-grained.
- Texture
- Soft set; Creamed; Crystallised; Runny
- Crystallisation
Fast — granulates within weeks
Granulates quickly, in the manner of the ivy honey it is closely related to. Most of it sets before it is sold.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 16–19% (typically 17.5%)
- Glucose-to-fructose ratio
- 1–1.25 (typically 1.12)
- pH
- 3.7–4.4 (typically 4)
These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. A glucose-leaning ratio consistent with the rapid set and with the Araliaceae honeys generally.
What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured
Where it comes from
- Floral source
- Pseudopanax arboreus, abundant in lowland New Zealand forest and in regenerating scrub on cleared land.
- Origins
- Throughout New Zealand, in lowland and lower montane forest.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- May to August (southern hemisphere)
Winter flowering, which is the whole basis of its importance. Rarely extracted — most of it feeds the colony.
- The bees
- Small open flowers with fully exposed nectaries on a large umbel-like head, accessible to everything — the same architecture that makes ivy so valuable in the northern hemisphere autumn, and used at the same point in the colony's year.
- Usual processing
- Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set)
Usually left for the colony rather than extracted, because taking a winter flow from a colony that needs it is poor practice.
What to do with it
A spreading honey. Its fast hard set is the practical point of it and its flavour is deliberately unremarkable.
SpreadingAt the tableIn hot drinksBaking
Pairings
- Buttered toast
Sets soft enough to spread cleanly and stays where it is put.
- Porridge
Enough body to survive a bowl of starch.
- Milky tea
Mild enough to sweeten without changing the cup.
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
Five finger regenerates readily on cleared land, which means New Zealand's history of forest clearance has left the country with rather more winter forage than the original forest may have offered — an unusual case of clearance helping bees.
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
- 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?