Ivy honey
Strong, faintly bitter and distinctly herbal — closer to a dark honey in character than its pale colour suggests.
The last honey of the European year, and the hardest to get out of the comb. Ivy flowers in October when nothing else of any scale does, and the honey it makes sets so fast and so solid that it commonly granulates in the frames before a beekeeper can extract it. Most of it therefore stays in the hive as winter stores, which is arguably the right outcome — the crop that reaches a jar is a small and awkward fraction of what the bees actually collect.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- cut hedge, green sap, faint aniseed, damp wood
- Flavour
- herbal bitterness, green stem, a mineral edge, muted sweetness
- Finish
- Dry and slightly bitter, lingering longer than expected.
- Intensity
- Pronounced
- Sweetness
- Moderately sweet
- Bitterness
- Noticeable
- 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 greenish-yellow when freshly extracted, and almost pure white once set — which it does almost immediately.
On setting: Turns hard, opaque and chalk-white. The transformation is dramatic and fast enough to watch over a fortnight.
- Texture
- Crystallised; Soft set; In the comb
Genuinely difficult to handle. Set ivy honey is hard enough to bend a spoon and does not soften usefully at room temperature.
- Crystallisation
Very fast — can set in the comb before it is extracted
Very high glucose relative to fructose, comparable to oilseed rape and in some seasons past it. Nucleation begins within days of extraction and routinely begins inside the comb, which is the practical reason ivy honey is rarely sold: by the time a beekeeper gets to it, it will not spin out. Where it is harvested, it is usually pressed or sold as cut comb.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 15–19% (typically 17%)
- Fructose
- 34–39% (typically 36.5%)
- Glucose
- 37–43% (typically 40%)
- Glucose-to-fructose ratio
- 1–1.2 (typically 1.1)
- pH
- 3.8–4.6 (typically 4.2)
- Electrical conductivity
- 0.3–0.7 mS/cm (typically 0.45 mS/cm)
These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Compositional work on ivy honey is thin because so little of it is extracted. The glucose share is the well-attested figure and the one that explains the behaviour.
What these mean: the sugars and the ratio · moisture · conductivity · how each is measured
Where it comes from
- Floral source
- Hedera helix, and only its mature flowering growth. Ivy clipped annually never flowers at all, which is why a wall smothered in ivy can be worth nothing to a bee.
- Origins
- Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal — anywhere with old walls, woodland edge and mild autumns.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- September to November (northern hemisphere)
The only significant flow this late in the temperate year. Warm still October days produce it; a cold October produces nothing.
- The bees
- Ivy nectar sits fully exposed on shallow open discs rather than in a tube, so wasps, hoverflies and beetles feed on it alongside bees. It also supports a dedicated specialist — the ivy bee, Colletes hederae, which emerges in September for this flowering and nothing else.
- What counts as monofloral
- No official threshold anywhere. In practice ivy honey identifies itself: nothing else in temperate Europe is flowering in quantity in late October, so an autumn crop from an ivy-rich site is effectively monofloral by default.
- Usual processing
- Pressed, Cut comb, Coarsely strained, Raw
Rarely a commercial product. Most beekeepers leave the ivy flow on the colony deliberately, because a late crop of dense high-glucose stores is exactly what a hive wants going into winter — with the caveat that hard-set stores are difficult for bees to use in a prolonged cold spell without access to water.
What to do with it
A cheese-board honey rather than a table honey, and a hard sell for anyone expecting pale to mean mild. Its bitterness works where sweetness alone would be dull, and it is wasted in tea.
SpreadingWith cheeseGlazing and roasting
Pairings
- Mature hard cheeses
The bitterness holds its own against a long-aged cheese in the way a mild honey cannot, and the set texture stays put on the plate.
- Dark rye bread
Both are bitter-edged and neither is trying to be sweet.
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
Ivy honey is a recent arrival as a named product rather than an old one. Warmer autumns across northwest Europe have extended the ivy flow, and a honey beekeepers historically wrote off as an unextractable nuisance has become a small speciality — the ivy bee's own northward expansion over the same decades is the same story told by a different animal.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- 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
- Why honey comes in different coloursHoney runs from nearly colourless to almost black, and the colour is set mainly by the plant. It correlates loosely with intensity, more strongly with mineral content, and not at all with quality.
- Which flowers make honeyBeing good for bees and producing a honey crop are different things. A honey crop needs a plant that flowers in enormous quantity, in one place, at one time — which most good bee plants do not.
- How honey bees survive winterHoney bees do not hibernate. They form a cluster, shiver to generate heat, eat their stores and move slowly through the comb — and most colony losses happen in this period.
- The best plants for beesA shortlist chosen on three criteria: how much nectar and pollen the plant produces, how accessible it is to different bees, and when it flowers. Season coverage matters more than any individual plant.
- Bee plants through the yearThe gaps matter more than the peaks. Almost every garden has plenty in June and nothing in February, and it is the empty months that limit what a garden can support.
- Autumn plants for beesAutumn forage decides how well colonies enter winter. It is also when one plant does more work than everything else combined, and most people regard it as a nuisance.
- Bee plants for a small gardenA small garden cannot do everything, so it should do the things large gardens usually skip: the winter and early spring gaps, and nesting habitat. Both take almost no space.
- Honeycomb: what it is, and how to eat itComb honey is honey as it left the bees, still in the wax they built to hold it. You can eat the wax, it will not harm you, and there is a reasonable argument that it is the most honest product in the category.
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?