HoneyHQ

Soybean honey

Very pale and very mild, with a clean light sweetness and almost nothing to distinguish it. Its virtue is neutrality.

MonofloralMildFloralButteryVegetal

A honey from the most widely grown legume on earth, and the most unpredictable major flow in North American beekeeping. Soybean is self-fertile and does not need bees at all, but in a hot humid July it can secrete heavily enough to fill supers across the Midwest — and in a dry one an apiary surrounded by it can starve.

Flavour and aroma

Aroma
clean sugar, faint green bean, beeswax
Flavour
clean sugar, light vanilla, faint green note
Finish
Short and clean.
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 almost colourless.

On setting: Sets to a fine white grain.

Texture
Runny; Soft set; Creamed
Crystallisation

Moderate — granulates over a few months

Sets over a few months to an even fine grain.

Typical composition

Moisture
16–19% (typically 17.5%)
Glucose-to-fructose ratio
0.9–1.1 (typically 1)
pH
3.6–4.3 (typically 3.9)
Electrical conductivity
0.15–0.4 mS/cm (typically 0.25 mS/cm)

These are typical ranges assembled across published work, not measurements of a specific honey. Low conductivity consistent with its pallor. Much of the American crop is blended rather than analysed as a monofloral.

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

Where it comes from

Floral source
Glycine max. The flowers are small, tucked into the leaf axils and easy to walk past, and whether they yield depends on humidity, variety and night temperature in ways that are still not well understood.
Origins
The American Midwest and Mississippi valley above all, with production in Brazil and Argentina.
Origin pages

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

Harvest
July to August (northern hemisphere)

Midsummer, and it coincides with the point at which many American landscapes have finished their clover.

The bees
Several studies find modest yield increases from insect visitation despite the crop's self-fertility, which makes soybean one of the clearer cases of a crop that benefits from bees without depending on them.
Usual processing
Spun (centrifugally extracted), Coarsely strained, Filtered, Creamed (seeded and controlled-set)

Rarely marketed under its own name. Most soybean honey goes into blends, which is a reasonable fate for a honey whose defining quality is that it tastes of very little.

What to do with it

A blending and general-purpose honey rather than a tasting one. Where a recipe wants sweetness and no opinion, this is the kind of honey it means.

At the tableSpreadingBakingIn hot drinksDesserts

Pairings

  • Delicate tea

    Mild enough not to bury a green or white tea, which is a genuine use for a neutral honey.

  • Plain yoghurt

    Lets the yoghurt's acidity lead, with the honey supplying sweetness and nothing else.

  • Buttered toast

    The everyday use, and it sets soft enough to spread cleanly.

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

Soybean's expansion across the American Midwest from the mid-twentieth century changed what American honey is made of, in the same way oilseed rape changed European honey a few decades later.

Sources

  • HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis

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

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