Africa honey

How honey is produced here

Bark hives hung high in miombo woodland, clay cylinders along the Nile, hollowed logs in the Ethiopian highlands. The African honey bee is defensive and is worked at night with smoke, which is a genuine skill and a genuine hazard. Certified organic production is unusually credible where woodland has no crop agriculture for many kilometres.

Flavour signature

The flavour families that recur across this origin’s honeys, counted from their sensory profiles rather than asserted.

• Caramel · 21
• Floral · 9
• Resinous · 7
• Fruity · 7
• Smoky · 5
• Woody · 5
• Herbaceous · 4
• Nutty · 4

Honeys from Africa

• Ethiopian white honeyWater white · MildClean, sweet and faintly herbal, with a smooth dense texture that dominates the impression more than the flavour does.
• Ethiopian red honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and warm with a malty depth, a resinous eucalyptus lift and a faint smokiness from traditional harvesting — an assertive honey that stands up to fermentation.
• Miombo honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and warm with a distinct woody, faintly smoky depth and a caramelised sweetness — the smoke comes partly from the harvest method and partly from the woodland itself.
• African acacia honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and spiced with a caramel base and a dry, faintly smoky finish — considerably more assertive than European acacia honey, which it is named after and resembles in no way.
• Fynbos honeyLight amber · PronouncedComplex and aromatic — herbal, faintly resinous and warmly caramelised, with a character that changes noticeably between producers.
• Baobab honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and mildly tangy with a distinct citrus-sherbet lift over caramel — brighter and more acidic than most African honeys and genuinely reminiscent of the tree's fruit.
• Shea honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and buttery with a nutty depth and a light caramel base — a rounded, approachable honey with a distinct richness.
• Oku white honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and creamy with a light floral character and a faint herbal lift — mild by African standards and distinctly refined.
• Euphorbia honeyLight amber · IntenseOverwhelmingly pungent — a sharp peppery burn at the back of the throat that builds for some seconds after swallowing and dominates everything else. Beneath it there is a warm caramel sweetness that most people never get to.
• Argan honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and nutty with a distinct roasted note and a light resinous edge — genuinely reminiscent of the oil, which is a rare coincidence between a honey and its tree's other product.
• Berseem honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint hay note — the archetype of an unassuming everyday honey.
• Mopane honeyAmber · PronouncedDark and malty with a savoury mineral depth and a faintly smoky finish — closer to a European forest honeydew than to an African blossom honey.
• Aloe honeyAmber · PronouncedDistinctly bitter with a warm caramel base and a faintly medicinal herbal note — the bitterness is pronounced and is the reason people buy it.
• Cashew honeyAmber · PronouncedTangy and resinous with a warm caramel base and a faintly astringent finish — assertive and quite unlike the mild nut it comes from.
• Moringa honeyExtra light amber · ModerateGreen, peppery and faintly vegetal over a light sweetness — recognisably related to the mustard-oil chemistry running through the whole plant.
• Babul honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm, nutty and full-bodied with a faint tannic dryness. A robust everyday honey rather than a delicate one.
• Talh honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, thick and savoury-sweet, with dried fruit and molasses over a caramel depth. Nothing about it suggests the honey Europe calls acacia.
• Tamarind honeyLight amber · ModerateAmber, warm and distinctly tart, with a caramel body and a sour-fruit edge that does echo the tamarind pod.
• Sweet thorn honeyExtra light amber · MildSoft, floral and clean, with a faint almond note carried over from the flower's own scent. An easy honey and a very well-made one at its best.
• Combretum honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramel-led with a dried-fruit depth and a faint woody dryness. A robust everyday honey rather than a delicate one.
• Niger seed honeyExtra light amber · MildGolden, clean and gently grassy, with a soft finish. Closer to sunflower honey than to the darker forest honeys of the same country.
• Niaouli honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedStrongly medicinal and eucalypt-like, with a camphorous aroma over an amber sweetness. Unmistakably a myrtle-family honey.
• Oil palm honeyLight amber · ModerateVariable by definition. Generally warm and mildly caramel-led, taking its character from whatever grew between and around the palms.
• Madagascar litchi honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedOvertly aromatic — muscat grape and rose over a light caramel body. One of the more perfumed honeys in the catalogue.
• African stingless bee honeyLight amber · PronouncedSharp, fruity and faintly smoky, with the acidity common to all stingless bee honey. Descriptions vary widely because the species and the flora both do.

Plants behind these honeys

• SheaVitellaria paradoxaA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the West African savannah.
• BushwillowCombretum speciesA major and under-documented African honey source, second only to the acacias across much of the savannah belt.
• Oil palmElaeis guineensisA heavy year-round pollen source and a poor nectar one, which makes plantation apiaries protein-rich and carbohydrate-poor — a genuine management problem rather than a technicality.
• CoffeeCoffea arabicaA heavy but very short-lived nectar source, in flushes rather than as a continuous flow.
• EucalyptusEucalyptusProlific in both nectar and pollen when flowering, though the pollen of some species is nutritionally poor for honey bees, and colonies confined to a single eucalypt species can suffer over time despite abundant forage.
• BaobabAdansonia digitataA good nectar and pollen source for the brief period the flowers are open.
• Resin spurgeEuphorbia resiniferaA good spring nectar source on ground that offers very little else.
• ArganArgania spinosaA good spring nectar source in a semi-arid landscape with few alternatives.
• Red cloverTrifolium pratenseTop-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
• White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.

Bees associated with this origin

• Western honey beeApis melliferaThe bee behind essentially all the world's honey, and the one most people mean when they say 'bee'. Apis mellifera is a perennial eusocial insect that overwinters as a living cluster rather than dying back each year — which is the whole reason it stores honey in quantity, and therefore the reason it was ever domesticated. It is native to Europe, Africa and western Asia and has been carried by people to every continent except Antarctica.
• African honey beeApis mellifera scutellataThe tropically adapted African honey bee that, crossed with European stock in Brazil in 1957, produced the Africanized populations of the Americas. In its own range it is simply the honey bee of eastern and southern Africa — productive, mobile, defensive, and superbly adapted to heat, drought and a formidable list of predators including honey badgers, ants and hive beetles.
• Stingless beesMeliponiniThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.
• Asian honey beeApis ceranaThe western honey bee's counterpart across Asia, and a bee whose importance is out of all proportion to its honey yield. Apis cerana is the original host of Varroa destructor — the mite that has reshaped beekeeping worldwide — and it lives with the parasite without collapse. Understanding how is one of the more consequential open questions in apiculture.
• Carpenter beesXylocopaThe largest bees most people ever see, and among the loudest. Carpenter bees excavate their own tunnels in dead wood using their mandibles — a remarkable feat for an insect — and the biggest species are the size of the top joint of a thumb. The violet carpenter bee, glossy black with iridescent blue-violet wings, is one of the most spectacular insects in Europe and is spreading northwards.
• Dwarf honey beeApis floreaThe smallest honey bee, and the one that does its waggle dance the right way up. Apis florea builds a single small comb wrapped around a twig in a bush, and because the top of that comb forms a horizontal platform, the dancing bee points directly at the food source rather than translating the direction into an angle against gravity. It is the simplest form of the dance language and probably the ancestral one.
• African mountain honey beeApis mellifera monticolaA honey bee of the high mountains of East Africa — Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, the Ethiopian highlands and the Ruwenzori — living above 2,000 metres in conditions no other African honey bee tolerates. It is larger, darker, hairier and markedly gentler than the lowland African bee, and it has attracted breeding interest for exactly that combination.
• Iberian honey beeApis mellifera iberiensisThe honey bee of Spain and Portugal, and one of the more genetically interesting subspecies in Europe — it carries ancestry from both the western European dark bee lineage and the African lineage across the Strait of Gibraltar, in a gradient running from north to south. It is defensive, frugal, prone to swarming, and superbly adapted to a landscape of long dry summers.

Honey in Africa

Ethiopian beekeeping is among the oldest continuous traditions in Africa, and tej — honey wine — is central to hospitality and ceremony. Egyptian beekeeping is the oldest documented anywhere, with Fifth Dynasty reliefs from around 2400 BCE showing smoking, extraction and sealing.