Sunflower honey
Straw, beeswax and pollen, with a slightly waxy mouthfeel and a fresh, faintly herbal edge.
Miel de tournesol / Girasol
A bright yellow-gold honey with an unusually vegetal, pollen-heavy character, and one of the fastest to set. Sunflower honey is a field-crop honey produced wherever sunflowers are grown for oil, and it has a distinctive straw-and-beeswax flavour that reads as rustic to admirers and as flat to detractors. Its brilliant colour and rapid granulation make it easy to identify.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- fresh straw, pollen, beeswax, camomile
- Flavour
- hay, beeswax, green stem, light caramel once set
- Finish
- Medium, faintly waxy.
- Intensity
- Moderate
- Sweetness
- Sweet
- Bitterness
- None
- Acidity
- Moderate
Colour, texture and crystallisation
- Colour
- Extra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)Light amber (50-85 mm Pfund)
Bright golden yellow, more saturated and more yellow than most honeys of the same depth.
On setting: Sets to an opaque, bright buttery yellow.
- Texture
- Crystallised; Soft set; Thick but pourable
- Crystallisation
Very fast — can set in the comb before it is extracted
High glucose share and a high pollen load — plenty of glucose to come out of solution and plenty of particles for it to nucleate on. It commonly granulates within weeks, and unlike rapeseed it tends to a coarser, more granular set that some readers find gritty.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 15–18.5% (typically 16.5%)
- Fructose
- 36–41% (typically 38%)
- Glucose
- 34–40% (typically 37%)
- Glucose-to-fructose ratio
- 0.9–1.1 (typically 0.97)
- pH
- 3.5–4.3 (typically 3.9)
- Electrical conductivity
- 0.2–0.5 mS/cm (typically 0.3 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
- Helianthus annuus, grown at field scale for oilseed.
- Origins
- France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Argentina and the United States.
- Origin pages
Resolved from both directions — origins this honey names, and origins that name it.
- Harvest
- July to August (northern hemisphere)
- The bees
- Sunflowers are an unusually visible two-way relationship: bee visitation measurably improves seed set and oil yield, so the crop genuinely benefits from the pollination as well as feeding the bees. Modern hybrid varieties differ considerably in how much nectar they secrete, and some yield very little honey.
- Usual processing
- Spun (centrifugally extracted), Creamed (seeded and controlled-set), Coarsely strained
What to do with it
A good everyday spreading honey once set, and a reasonable baking honey. Its vegetal note reads oddly in delicate tea and well in anything with butter or oats.
SpreadingBakingAt the tableGlazing and roasting
Pairings
- Fresh cow's milk cheeses
Both mild and lactic; the honey's waxiness gives the pairing something to hold.
- Cornbread and oat biscuits
Grain and straw are the same family of flavour.
- Roast carrots and parsnips
Its vegetal edge belongs in savoury company more than in a dessert.
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
Sources
- 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
Tools for choosing and using honey
- Honey finder
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- Flavour selector
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- Honey comparison
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- Honey substitute calculator
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- Storage guide
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