Tree lucerne honey
Mild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint nutty note — pleasant, undemanding and mostly eaten by bees rather than people.
A honey from tree lucerne, a Canary Island legume shrub planted extensively across New Zealand and Australia as fodder and shelter, and one of the most valuable early-season sources in both countries. It flowers in winter and early spring when almost nothing else does, which makes it a colony-building crop far more than a saleable one.
Flavour and aroma
- Aroma
- light florals, warm hay, faint nuts
- Flavour
- soft floral, light caramel, faint nuts
- Finish
- Short and clean.
- Intensity
- Mild
- Sweetness
- Sweet
- Bitterness
- None
- Acidity
- Moderate
Colour, texture and crystallisation
- Colour
- Extra light amber (34-50 mm Pfund)Light amber (50-85 mm Pfund)
Pale gold, clear and bright.
On setting: Sets to a fine pale cream.
- Texture
- Runny; Soft set; Creamed
- Crystallisation
Moderate — granulates over a few months
A moderate fine set, as with legume honeys generally.
Typical composition
- Moisture
- 16–20% (typically 18%)
- Fructose
- 36–41% (typically 38%)
- Glucose
- 30–36% (typically 33%)
- pH
- 3.6–4.4 (typically 4)
- Electrical conductivity
- 0.1–0.5 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
- Chamaecytisus palmensis, tree lucerne or tagasaste, a Canary Island legume planted as fodder, shelter and nurse crop.
- Origins
- New Zealand and Australia, from farm plantings, shelterbelts and naturalised stands.
- Harvest
- July to October (southern hemisphere)
A winter and early spring flow, which is precisely when it matters most.
- The bees
- Its winter flowering makes it disproportionately valuable — pollen and nectar in August build the colonies that will work the summer crops. Bumblebees, introduced to New Zealand in the 1880s to pollinate red clover, work it heavily too.
- Usual processing
- Raw, Coarsely strained, Spun (centrifugally extracted), Creamed (seeded and controlled-set)
Its principal value is building colonies before the main season rather than filling supers. Farmers plant it for fodder and shelter, and the beekeeping benefit is incidental.
What to do with it
Rarely available as a named honey, because most of it is consumed by the colony as it builds.
At the tableSpreadingBaking
Pairings
- Toast
Straightforward.
- Fresh cheeses
Both mild.
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
Tagasaste was introduced from the Canary Islands to Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century as a drought-tolerant fodder shrub, and it has become one of the most useful early-season bee plants in both countries.
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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