HoneyHQ

Milk vetch honey

Soft, mild and slightly floral with a faint green-bean freshness — an unassuming honey made in enormous quantity.

MonofloralMildFloralVegetalButtery

紫云英蜜

One of the largest honey crops in east Asia, from a legume sown across rice paddies over winter as a green manure. Chinese milk vetch is ploughed in before the rice goes down, and the few weeks it spends in flower first produce an enormous, reliable, very pale honey crop across southern China and Japan. It is another honey that exists because of a soil decision.

Flavour and aroma

Aroma
fresh legume flower, light blossom, clean wax
Flavour
clean sweetness, a soft floral note, faint green vegetal
Finish
Short and gentle.
Intensity
Mild
Sweetness
Very sweet
Bitterness
None
Acidity
Low

Colour, texture and crystallisation

Colour
Water white (0-8 mm Pfund)Extra white (8-17 mm Pfund)White (17-34 mm Pfund)

Very pale, sometimes with a faint amber tinge in heavier crops.

On setting: Sets to a smooth fine white cream.

Texture
Runny; Soft set; Creamed
Crystallisation

Moderate — granulates over a few months

Granulates over a few months with very fine crystals, giving a smooth rather than gritty set.

Typical composition

Moisture
16–20% (typically 17.8%)
Fructose
37–42% (typically 39.5%)
Glucose
31–37% (typically 34%)
Glucose-to-fructose ratio
0.79–0.96 (typically 0.87)
pH
3.6–4.4 (typically 4)
Electrical conductivity
0.1–0.3 mS/cm (typically 0.19 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
Astragalus sinicus, sown into rice paddies in autumn and turned in as green manure in spring. Not to be confused with the Astragalus species used in Chinese herbal medicine, which is a different plant.
Origins
The Yangtze basin and southern China — Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui and Zhejiang — and southern Japan, where it is known as renge honey.
Origin pages

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

Harvest
March to May (northern hemisphere)

Three to five weeks, and it ends abruptly when the fields are ploughed for rice — the flow is terminated by a tractor rather than by the weather.

The bees
A vast, concentrated and dependable flow, and the anchor of migratory beekeeping across southern China. Colonies build enormously on it before moving north for the later crops.
Usual processing
Spun (centrifugally extracted), Filtered, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set), Coarsely strained

What to do with it

The everyday honey of large parts of east Asia, and good at it. Mild, smooth-setting and versatile.

At the tableSpreadingIn hot drinksBakingDesserts

Pairings

  • Green tea

    Mild enough not to interfere with a delicate infusion.

  • Plain yoghurt

    Sweetness and body with nothing competing.

  • Toast and plain breads

    The fine smooth set spreads well.

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

The crop's decline is worth recording. Chinese milk vetch acreage has fallen sharply as chemical fertiliser replaced green manure across Chinese rice systems, and one of the largest honey flows in the world has shrunk with it — the same pattern that removed sainfoin honey from Europe, at a much larger scale.

Sources

  • HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
  • FAOSTAT production and trade statistics — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations · Government statistics

How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.

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