Metcalfa honeydew honey
Moderately sweet with a distinct fig and dried-fruit character over a malty base — noticeably fruitier than the conifer honeydews and quite unlike them.
Miele di melata di Metcalfa
A honeydew honey that did not exist before 1979, produced from the excretions of an American planthopper that arrived accidentally in Italy and spread across southern Europe. It is a genuinely new honey created by an invasive insect, and Italian beekeepers found themselves with a substantial late-summer crop from a pest nobody wanted.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- dried fig, molasses, warm wood
- Flavour
- fig, dried fruit, malt, light mineral
- Finish
- Medium and malty.
- Intensity
- Moderate
- Sweetness
- Moderately sweet
- Bitterness
- Trace
- Acidity
- Low
Colour, texture and crystallisation
- Colour
- Amber (85-114 mm Pfund)Dark amber (over 114 mm Pfund)
Dark amber to brown, sometimes with a greenish cast.
- Texture
- Thick but pourable; Runny
- Crystallisation
Very slow — often still liquid after a year or more
Very slow, in common with honeydew honeys generally — low glucose and a high oligosaccharide content both suppress crystallisation.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 15–18.5% (typically 16.5%)
- Fructose
- 30–37% (typically 33%)
- Glucose
- 24–31% (typically 27%)
- pH
- 4.2–5.4 (typically 4.7)
- Electrical conductivity
- 0.8–1.6 mS/cm (typically 1.1 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
- Honeydew excreted by Metcalfa pruinosa, a North American planthopper feeding on a very wide range of trees and shrubs — including grapevine, hazel, ash, robinia and many garden plants.
- Origins
- Italy principally, and increasingly Slovenia, Croatia, France, Spain and Hungary as the insect has spread.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- July to September (northern hemisphere)
Late summer, and the timing depends on planthopper populations rather than on any flowering.
- The bees
- Honey bees collect the honeydew from leaves and stems. Because Metcalfa feeds on such a wide range of host plants, the honey is not tied to any one tree, which is unusual for a honeydew and makes it available in landscapes with no forest at all.
- Usual processing
- Raw, Coarsely strained, Spun (centrifugally extracted)
Yield tracks planthopper populations, which are large in warm years. Because the insect is a pest of vineyards and orchards, insecticide programmes directly affect the crop — an unusually direct conflict.
What to do with it
Its low sweetness and fig note make it a natural cheese honey, and it works in baking where a fruitier depth is wanted.
At the tableWith cheeseDrizzlingBakingDesserts
Pairings
- Aged pecorino and parmesanClassic
The Italian pairing; fig and hard sheep cheese is a combination that predates the honey by centuries.
- Fresh figs and walnuts
The honey already tastes of figs, which makes this straightforward.
- Panforte and dense fruit cakes
Dried fruit against dried fruit.
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
Metcalfa pruinosa was first recorded in Europe near Treviso in 1979, almost certainly arriving with imported plant material. It spread rapidly across Italy and beyond. Within a decade beekeepers had a new honey, which is a rare instance of a biological invasion producing a marketable product rather than only costs.
Sources
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
- Council Directive 2001/110/EC relating to honey — Council of the European Union (2001) · Regulatory guidance Link
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides that cover this honey
- 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.
- The best honey for cheeseHoney and cheese work because sweetness, salt and fat balance each other. The pairing fails when the honey is too mild to register or so strong it flattens the cheese.
- Fruity honeysA small group of honeys that taste recognisably of fruit — sometimes of the fruit their own plant produces, which is a coincidence worth understanding.
- Dark honeysDark honeys are higher in minerals and phenolic compounds than pale ones, which makes them stronger, more savoury and — in laboratory terms though not in clinical ones — more antioxidant-rich.
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?