Forest honeydew honey

Flavour and aroma

Aroma

pine resin, damp forest floor, malt, dried fig, woodsmoke

Flavour

resin, caramelised malt, dried fruit, a distinct salty-mineral note

Finish

Long, resinous and savoury.

Intensity

Pronounced

Sweetness

Moderately sweet

Bitterness

Trace

Acidity

Low

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour

Dark amber (over 114 mm Pfund)

Very dark brown, often with a distinct greenish or blackish cast; fir honeydew can look almost black with green highlights.

Texture

Thick but pourable; Runny

Crystallisation

Very slow — often still liquid after a year or more

Low glucose relative to fructose, plus a substantial fraction of higher sugars — melezitose, erlose and other oligosaccharides that nectar honeys largely lack — which interfere with crystal formation. The exception is honeydew rich in melezitose, which can set hard in the comb so rapidly that beekeepers call it cement honey and cannot extract it at all.

Typical composition

Moisture

15–19% (typically 16.5%)

Fructose

31–38% (typically 34%)

Glucose

24–31% (typically 27%)

Glucose-to-fructose ratio

0.7–0.9 (typically 0.79)

pH

4.5–6.1 (typically 5.2)

Electrical conductivity

0.8–2.2 mS/cm (typically 1.3 mS/cm)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Electrical conductivity above 0.8 mS/cm is the formal criterion separating honeydew honey from floral honey in both the Codex standard and the EU directive. It is a proxy for mineral content, which is what makes honeydew honey taste the way it does.

What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured

Where it comes from

Floral source

No floral source. The sugar comes from sap-feeding insects on silver fir, spruce, pine and oak. Greek pine honey depends on a single scale insect, Marchalina hellenica, on Pinus brutia — a three-way relationship between a tree, an insect and a bee.

Origins

Germany (the Black Forest), Austria, Switzerland, Greece (which produces a large share of the world's pine honey), Turkey, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

Origin pages

• Greece
• The Black Forest
• Germany
• Austria
• Switzerland
• Slovenia
• The Alps

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

Harvest

June to September (northern hemisphere)

Wholly dependent on the aphid population, which varies enormously year to year. A honeydew flow can fail completely for several seasons and then be exceptional.

The bees

Bees collect honeydew from surfaces rather than from flowers, which means this honey involves no pollination at all — the clearest case on the site of honey and pollination being separable. Honeydew is also harder on colonies overwintering on it: its higher mineral and oligosaccharide content is less digestible, and beekeepers in honeydew regions often remove it before winter.

Usual processing

Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained

Sold under regional names — Tannenhonig for silver fir, Waldhonig for mixed forest, pine honey in Greece and Turkey — that describe the tree rather than any flower.

What to do with it

Its lower sweetness makes it unusually useful in savoury cooking, and its resinous depth survives heat. A good honey for a cheeseboard and for glazing pork or game.

At the tableSpreadingWith cheeseIn hot drinksGlazing and roastingMarinades

Pairings

• Alpine cheeses — comté, gruyère, appenzellerClassic

  Nutty, mineral cheeses from the same mountains. The pairing is regional and also genuinely well matched.

• Dark rye bread

  Sourness and malt on the bread's side; resin and mineral on the honey's.

• Game and pork glazes

  Low sweetness means it deepens a glaze instead of turning it into a dessert.

• Black tea

  Enough weight to be tasted through a strong assam, which a floral honey is not.

History and traditional use

• A staple honey of central European alpine regions, where floral flows are short and forest honeydew is reliable in good years.

Traditional use records that people have done something, and for how long. It is not evidence that it works.