Honey by where it comes from — continents, countries and named regions, each with the honeys, plants and bees the catalogue records for it.
29 honeys
The continent with the widest range of distinct monofloral honeys anywhere, divided cleanly by climate: forest and honeydew honeys in the north and centre, aromatic scrub honeys around the Mediterranean. Europe is also where honey origin protection is most developed, with protected designations covering honeys from Corsica to La Alcarria.
28 honeys
The only continent where the producing bee genuinely changes the product. Four native honey bee species live here alongside the introduced western honey bee, and wild-harvested giant honey bee honey is a different thing from hived honey in composition, handling and risk.
25 honeys
A continent of forest and savannah honeys produced overwhelmingly by the African honey bee, much of it in traditional bark, log and basket hives. African honey includes some of the most distinctive products in this catalogue and reaches export markets in comparatively small quantities.
24 honeys
A continent of field-crop honeys and a handful of prized regional varietals. Clover and alfalfa carry the volume; basswood, sourwood, tupelo and the Californian chaparral honeys carry the reputation.
17 honeys
A continent producing at very large scale for export, with Argentina and Brazil among the world's biggest suppliers, alongside distinctive regional honeys from the Chilean temperate rainforest and the Brazilian caatinga.
16 honeys
A climate rather than a country: hot dry summers, mild wet winters and an aromatic scrub flora of thyme, rosemary, lavender, savory and rockrose that produces honeys with more aromatic character than anywhere else in the temperate world.
12 honeys
The centre of the world's stingless beekeeping expansion and the home of the giant honey bee's most famous nesting tree. Four different bee groups produce honey here commercially, which is more than anywhere else on earth.
9 honeys
A peninsula with an unusual concentration of honey diversity for its size — Mediterranean scrub honeys on the coast, oak and fir honeydews in the mountains, and acacia and linden on the continental plains.
9 honeys
A boreal producing region with a very short season, where the whole year's work is compressed into a few weeks and colonies face long winters. Nordic honey is largely consumed domestically and rarely exported.
6 honeys
The only major biome entirely within Brazil, and one of the more successful organic honey stories anywhere — a thorny semi-arid forest supporting a certified export crop with no irrigation and almost no agrochemical input.
6 honeys
The high mountain pastures of the Tien Shan and Pamir produce a naturally white honey set so hard and so pale that it is sold in blocks and eaten with a knife.
6 honeys
The semi-arid belt across Africa where acacia woodland supplies both gum arabic and honey, and where the flowering follows the rains rather than the calendar.
5 honeys
An island region producing pale tropical honeys from naturalised trees and scrub, much of it from plants introduced for entirely different purposes centuries ago.
4 honeys
The most expensive honey region on earth. Sidr and talh honeys from the Arabian wadis reach prices that no European monofloral approaches, sustained by a domestic market that treats honey as a serious food rather than a condiment.
36 honeys
A continent-sized honey landscape running from Florida mangrove to Alaskan fireweed, and the country where the movable-frame hive, migratory pollination and industrial-scale beekeeping were all developed.
26 honeys
A continent of eucalypt honey, where the differences between eucalypt species are larger than most people expect. Australian honeys divide usefully into the pale dense box honeys and the strong dark ironbarks, with Tasmanian leatherwood standing apart from both.
20 honeys
A producing country of enormous range, from the Himalayan hill forests to the mangroves of the Sundarbans and the thorn forest of the centre. Indian honey is produced by all four native Asian honey bee species as well as introduced western honey bees, and much of it is wild-harvested.
20 honeys
A country whose honey is defined by hedgerows rather than by monoculture. British production is small, overwhelmingly hobbyist, and dominated by mixed spring and summer blossom honeys — with ling heather from the northern moors as the one genuinely prestigious monofloral.
18 honeys
The largest honey market in Europe and one of its most demanding. Germany consumes far more honey than it produces, and the standards its buyers apply — particularly around honeydew and around adulteration testing — shape what the rest of the continent can sell.
15 honeys
One of Europe's largest producers and the country with the deepest surviving forest-beekeeping tradition. Polish honey runs from pale rapeseed and linden to very dark buckwheat and honeydew, across a landscape that still holds substantial unimproved meadow.
14 honeys
The largest honey producer in the world by a wide margin, with a migratory beekeeping industry that follows crops across the country from spring rape to autumn tea blossom. Chinese production spans subtropical winter flows and northern continental summers.
12 honeys
The source of the world's benchmark pale honey. Canadian prairie colonies produce some of the highest yields anywhere, on a season of barely eight weeks and daylight that runs almost to midnight.
12 honeys
An Atlantic-Mediterranean hybrid with an unusual monofloral range for its size — rosemary and lavender from the interior, eucalyptus from the coastal plantations, chestnut from the north, and rockrose and strawberry tree from the scrub.
11 honeys
A major exporter whose most distinctive honeys come from the caatinga thorn scrub of the northeast and from an extensive stingless beekeeping tradition.
11 honeys
The most varied monofloral production in Europe, supported by a strong domestic culture of single-source honey and an established sensory-analysis tradition.
11 honeys
A vast producing country whose two great honeys come from opposite ends of it — the lime forests of Bashkortostan in the southern Urals, and the compressed summer flora of the Siberian taiga. Russian domestic honey culture is strong and largely separate from the export market.
10 honeys
A small, damp, overwhelmingly pastoral honey landscape where clover, bramble and ivy do most of the work and heather from the western bogs supplies the one honey worth travelling for.
10 honeys
One of the world's largest honey exporters, with production centred on the Yucatán peninsula and carried by tens of thousands of small Maya beekeeping households.
10 honeys
The origin of manuka honey and a major clover honey producer, with a regulatory definition governing what may be exported as manuka.
10 honeys
The largest honey exporter in Southeast Asia, built on longan orchards in the north and on a rapidly growing stingless bee sector.
10 honeys
One of the world's largest honey producers and the country holding the most honey bee subspecies within a single border. Turkey produces the great majority of world pine honeydew honey, alongside the country's prestige products — Anzer plateau honey and the grayanotoxin-bearing mad honey of the Black Sea coast.
9 honeys
One of the largest honey exporters on earth, working clover and alfalfa on the pampas and thorny legume scrub in the dry interior — and exporting almost all of it in bulk.
9 honeys
An archipelago with wild forest honey from Sumatra and Kalimantan, plantation honey from acacia and rubber, and a stingless bee sector growing alongside Malaysia's.
9 honeys
One of Europe's largest honey producers, with a Mediterranean scrub flora that yields an unusual number of distinct monoflorals — rosemary, thyme, orange blossom, lavender, rockrose and heather among them.
8 honeys
A country whose native temperate rainforest produces honeys with no northern-hemisphere equivalent — ulmo, tiaca and quillay from a flora that is largely endemic.
8 honeys
Home of tualang honey, taken from Apis dorsata combs hanging fifty metres up the tallest trees in the rainforest, and of the most developed stingless beekeeping industry anywhere.
8 honeys
A country where honey is harvested from cliffs by rope as well as kept in hives, and where the world's largest honey bee builds combs on overhangs several hundred metres up.
8 honeys
A major producer of sidr and acacia honeys, with a migratory industry that follows the mustard, citrus and babul flows across the Punjab and Sindh.
8 honeys
A small high-value producer with among the highest honey prices anywhere, working alpine meadow, chestnut and forest honeydew flows across a very compressed altitudinal range.
8 honeys
Historically one of the largest honey producers in Europe, working sunflower, linden, buckwheat and acacia across the black-earth belt — and the home of the movable-frame hive.
8 honeys
One of the largest honey exporters in Asia, built on coffee blossom from the Central Highlands and on rubber and acacia plantations.
7 honeys
The African country with the most honey bee colonies and among the most in the world, producing two very different honeys — the pale white honey of the Tigray highlands and the dark red forest honey that supplies the national drink.
7 honeys
Producer of lavender, chestnut, acacia and fir honeydew honeys, with several protected geographical indications and a well-developed regional honey culture.
7 honeys
A small producer in an intensively farmed country, notable less for volume than for two things: heather honey from the remaining Veluwe heathlands, and a seed and orchard sector that makes pollination contracts a larger part of beekeeping income than honey is.
7 honeys
An archipelago where coconut supplies the continuous background flow and where indigenous stingless beekeeping — kept for pollination as much as for honey — is expanding on smallholder farms.
7 honeys
One of the largest honey producers in the European Union and the principal source of the acacia honey that western Europe buys. Romanian production is migratory, commercial and heavily export-oriented.
7 honeys
The most beekeeping-dense country in Europe and the home of the Carniolan bee. Slovenia has roughly one beekeeper for every two hundred people and treats the craft as a matter of national identity.
7 honeys
A country with two native honey bee subspecies, a floral kingdom found nowhere else, and a beekeeping industry that depends more on pollination contracts than on honey.
7 honeys
The centre of the gum arabic trade and a substantial producer of acacia honey from the same trees, worked by migratory beekeepers following the Sahelian flowering.
7 honeys
One of Africa's largest honey producers, working the miombo woodland belt with bark and log hives in a system that has changed little in centuries and produces a great deal.
6 honeys
An alpine producer where forest honeydew and mountain meadow honey dominate, and where the Carniolan bee — the standard bee of the eastern Alps — was first described and bred.
6 honeys
A country whose most famous honey comes from the largest mangrove forest on earth, harvested from wild giant honey bee combs by licensed honey hunters who go in on foot.
6 honeys
A forest-and-meadow honey landscape where buckwheat, linden and willow dominate, and where tree beekeeping survived longer than almost anywhere in Europe.
6 honeys
A Balkan producer working acacia, lavender, sunflower and oak honeydew, and the largest lavender grower in the world — which gives it a lavender honey most of Europe has never met.
5 honeys
Two honey countries in one: a Mediterranean coast producing sage, savory and immortelle honeys on Dalmatian karst, and a continental interior working acacia, linden and oak honeydew.
5 honeys
The place with the oldest documented beekeeping anywhere. Fifth Dynasty reliefs from around 2400 BCE show bees being smoked, honey extracted and vessels sealed, and clay cylinder hives worked from the rear are still in use in the Nile valley.
5 honeys
A boreal honey landscape of berry heath, willowherb and forest, with among the highest per-colony yields in Europe thanks to a short season of nearly continuous daylight.
5 honeys
Home of thyme honey and of a very large share of world pine honeydew production. Greek per-capita honey consumption is among the highest anywhere.
5 honeys
A Central American producer working coffee, cardamom and Yucatán-type scrub flows, and the largest cardamom exporter in the world.
5 honeys
A small domestic producer with a strong preference for local honey, which commands a substantial premium over the imports that make up most of national consumption. Japanese honeys are largely orchard and mountain forest products.
5 honeys
An East African producer working acacia, coffee and baobab flows, with a beekeeping sector that runs from log hives in the drylands to frame hives on smallholdings.
5 honeys
Producer of two honeys with no real equivalent anywhere — the burning euphorbia honey of the Atlas slopes and the nutty argan honey of the Souss, from a tree that grows naturally nowhere else on earth.
5 honeys
The northernmost commercial honey production in Europe, working heather, bilberry and raspberry across a landscape where the flowering season is measured in weeks.
5 honeys
A small tropical producer working coconut, cardamom and forest flows, where most honey comes from Apis cerana in traditional hives and from wild Apis dorsata combs.
5 honeys
A northern honey landscape of berry heaths, forest and short intense summers, where bilberry and lingonberry give honeys that exist almost nowhere else.
5 honeys
The centre of certified organic miombo honey production, where bark-hive beekeeping in the northwestern forests supplies a substantial European export trade.
4 honeys
A small, intensively farmed honey landscape dominated by rapeseed and clover, with heather from the Jutland heaths as the one honey with a distinct regional identity.
4 honeys
A small intensive producer working citrus, eucalyptus and wildflower flows, and the site of the oldest excavated apiary in the ancient Near East.
4 honeys
A steppe and mountain producer sharing the Altai range with Russia, and working sainfoin, sunflower and high meadow flows in a continental climate of extremes.
4 honeys
A producer of sesame, sunflower and forest honeys with a substantial wild-harvesting tradition, and one of the least documented beekeeping countries in Asia.
4 honeys
One of the driest honey-producing countries on earth, working acacia and mopane in the north where rainfall is sufficient, with an aloe honey from the desert margin.
4 honeys
A West African producer working acacia, shea and baobab flows in the Casamance and the Sahelian north, with beekeeping promoted as an alternative to charcoal production.
4 honeys
A Balkan producer whose acacia honey competes directly with Hungarian and Romanian, and whose plum orchards supply one of Europe's few genuine plum-blossom honeys.
4 honeys
Producer of sidr honey, among the most expensive and most counterfeited honeys in the world, from the ziziphus trees of the wadi systems. Yemeni beekeeping is migratory and very old, and it has been severely disrupted by war.
4 honeys
A southern African producer working mopane and acacia woodland, where honey is one of the few dependable dryland incomes and beekeeping is promoted for exactly that reason.
3 honeys
A dryland producer working mopane and acacia woodland, where honey is a small but genuinely drought-resilient income in a country with few agricultural options.
3 honeys
A large and under-reported producer working astragalus, thyme and citrus flows across a country whose altitude range runs from below sea level to over five thousand metres.
3 honeys
A miombo woodland producer where beekeeping is promoted specifically as an incentive to leave forest standing, and where honey and beeswax are both significant smallholder incomes.
3 honeys
A very small honey producer in a country with almost no tradition of it, working sea buckthorn, goji and steppe meadow in a climate that makes overwintering colonies genuinely difficult.
3 honeys
A miombo and coastal producer with a small formal sector, where most honey is harvested from traditional hives and consumed or traded locally.
3 honeys
A large country with a small documented honey sector, working shea and sesame in the north and forest and oil-palm flows in the south.
3 honeys
The largest honey market in the Gulf and a substantial producer in its own right, with sidr from the Asir and Jazan highlands and talh from the acacia wadis.
3 honeys
A small pastoral producer working eucalyptus plantations and native grassland, exporting most of its crop and consuming very little of it.
2 honeys
The world's leading producer of acacia honey, from extensive Robinia pseudoacacia plantations established in part for that purpose.
2 honeys
A small producer with a long tradition, working sidr and samar honeys in the Hajar mountains and the Dhofar wadis using hollow-log hives alongside modern frames.
2 honeys
Ling heather honey from moorland, produced by moving colonies onto the moors for the August flow in a tradition several centuries old.
19 honeys
The largest honey-producing state in Australia, and the one with the widest range of eucalypt flows — from coastal swamp mahogany in winter to inland yellow box and ironbark in summer.
13 honeys
A subtropical and tropical honey state producing ironbark, yapunyah and bloodwood from the inland, macadamia from the coastal orchards, and most of Australia's sugarbag from native stingless bees.
13 honeys
A temperate southern state working red gum along the Murray, mallee in the northwest and stringybark in the ranges, with a substantial almond pollination industry alongside.
11 honeys
A Mediterranean-climate state producing several of the most prized American varietals — sage, star thistle, ceanothus and blue curls — and simultaneously the centre of industrial migratory pollination.
11 honeys
The richest concentration of named American monoflorals — tupelo, sourwood, gallberry, titi and palmetto — from swamp, pine flatwood and southern Appalachian forest.
10 honeys
A forest-and-meadow honey landscape running from the Baltic coast inland, where linden, buckwheat, willow and berry-heath honeys are produced in a tradition closer to Russian and Polish practice than to western European.
10 honeys
A cool wet corner of North America producing fireweed from burned and logged ground, meadowfoam from the Willamette seed farms, and berry honeys from the coastal fog belt.
9 honeys
A dry state producing mallee and yellow gum honeys, and home to Kangaroo Island — where a population of Ligurian bees has been kept isolated since the 1880s.
8 honeys
A subtropical producing state whose honeys come from pine flatwoods, coastal mangrove and citrus grove, and whose autumn crop comes from a prohibited invasive shrub.
8 honeys
A fruit and seed-crop landscape moderated by the lakes, producing basswood, blueberry and cherry blossom honeys and a substantial carrot-seed crop nobody outside the trade has heard of.
7 honeys
A brush-country honey landscape where thorny legumes — mesquite, huajillo, catclaw, huisache — produce pale delicate honeys that nothing about the terrain would lead you to expect.
6 honeys
The southwest of Western Australia is one of about thirty-six global biodiversity hotspots, home to some eight thousand plant species of which around half grow nowhere else. Its honeys — jarrah, karri, marri and the wildflower blends — come from a flora with no equivalent anywhere.
5 honeys
The warm northern tip of New Zealand and the heart of the manuka industry, where towai and pohutukawa open the season before the manuka flow arrives.
4 honeys
The black locust plantations of the Alföld are the single largest source of acacia honey in the world, and the reason a North American tree defines a Central European honey.
3 honeys
Silver fir honeydew country, and the source of Tannenhonig — among the most distinctive honeydew honeys in Europe.
3 honeys
The heartland of Maya stingless beekeeping, where Melipona beecheii has been kept in log hives for well over a thousand years, and a substantial producer of Apis honey today.
2 honeys
Lavender and lavandin plateaux, and the origin of the Miel de Provence protected geographical indication.
7 honeys
A Mediterranean island with citrus groves on the coastal plains, thyme and thistle on the interior hills, and the black bee of the Iblei mountains — a distinct population saved from extinction in the 1970s.
7 honeys
Home of the beech forest honeydew system — one of the most productive in any temperate forest — and of the Central Otago thyme country, where a Mediterranean herb honey is produced in the far south Pacific.
5 honeys
An island with a protected designation covering six distinct honey types from a single maquis flora, and one of the clearest demonstrations anywhere that season matters as much as species.
5 honeys
The centre of corbezzolo production, and the source of the most bitter honey in commerce.
4 honeys
An island with a honey tradition running back to the Bronze Age and a herb flora — thyme, oregano, dittany — that produces some of the most aromatic honeys in the Mediterranean.
4 honeys
An island honey landscape built almost entirely on introduced plants, producing a white crystallised kiawe honey from mesquite that arrived in 1828 and an ohia lehua honey from the native forest.
4 honeys
A volcanic archipelago with an endemic flora that produces honeys from plants growing naturally nowhere else — the giant echiums of Tenerife and the white broom of the Teide caldera at over two thousand metres.
3 honeys
An island with a flora largely endemic and a honey sector built on two introduced trees — litchi and niaouli — which is an awkward thing to be able to say about the most biologically distinctive island on earth.
2 honeys
The only source of leatherwood honey, from Eucryphia lucida in western cool temperate rainforest.
8 honeys
The defining mountain honey landscape of Europe, where altitude rather than latitude sets the season and where forest honeydew and high meadow honey are produced within a few kilometres of each other.
6 honeys
A hardwood forest region producing two of the most sought-after American honeys — sourwood and tulip poplar — from trees scattered through mixed forest rather than grown as crops.
6 honeys
The highest honey landscape on earth, and the home of two bees found nowhere else: the giant Himalayan honey bee that nests on cliffs, and the high-altitude races of Apis cerana that work above three thousand metres.