The Alps honey

How honey is produced here

Transhumant beekeeping is long established: colonies follow the flowering up the mountain through the summer, from valley orchards in April to high meadow in July. The fir and spruce honeydews of the alpine forests are among the most valued honeys in Europe and among the least predictable.

Flavour signature

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

• Woody · 5
• Caramel · 4
• Resinous · 4
• Mineral and saline · 4
• Herbaceous · 3
• Floral · 3
• Malty · 3

Honeys from The Alps

• Alpine meadow honeyExtra light amber · ModerateComplex and aromatic, with a herbal lift over warm caramel and a distinctly clean finish — the flavour of a great many plants rather than of any one.
• Mountain honeyLight amber · PronouncedAromatic, complex and warm, with a herbal-resinous depth and considerably more going on than a lowland multifloral. It tastes of a landscape rather than of a flower.
• Silver fir honeyDark amber · PronouncedMalty, resinous and barely sweet, with a balsamic depth and a long woody finish. One of the least sugary honeys there is.
• Spruce honeydew honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and caramelised with a woody depth and restrained sweetness — warmer and less balsamic than fir honeydew.
• Forest honeydew honeyDark amber · PronouncedResinous, malty and mineral, with far less sweetness than its darkness suggests. Closer to treacle and pine forest than to anything floral.
• Dandelion honeyLight amber · PronouncedSharp, pungent and unmistakably strong for a spring honey — a chamomile-and-hay aroma with an animal note behind it that fades as the honey ages.
• Chestnut honeyAmber · IntenseAromatic, woody and unmistakably bitter — sweetness first, tannin second, and a long dry finish.
• Bilberry honeyAmber · PronouncedTangy and berry-forward over a caramel base, with a green astringency and a genuine fruit acidity.

Plants behind these honeys

• Wildflower meadowMixed native floraThe highest combined forage value of anything in this catalogue, because of diversity and duration rather than any single plant's output.
• Silver firAbies albaNo floral nectar and negligible pollen. Its entire forage value is honeydew, which is why nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue — a single bee-friendliness score would make this tree look worthless.
• Norway sprucePicea abiesNo floral nectar. Honeydew is the whole of its value, and it can be very substantial.
• Red cloverTrifolium pratenseTop-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
• ThymeThymus
• Bird's-foot trefoilLotus corniculatusGood for both, over a long season, from a plant that thrives on the poor unimproved ground most other forage will not tolerate.
• HarebellCampanula rotundifoliaA moderate nectar source and a critical pollen source — critical not in volume but in that specific bees can use nothing else.
• Scots pinePinus sylvestrisNo floral nectar, moderate wind-borne pollen that bees will collect, and honeydew in very large quantities where the scale insect is established.
• DandelionTaraxacum officinaleThe pollen is what makes it critical. It arrives when colonies are expanding fastest and have the least in reserve, and bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation depend on early sources like this one to found a nest at all.
• Sweet chestnutCastanea sativaAn exceptional pollen source — the catkins shed enormous quantities — and a good nectar source in the right weather. The pollen arrives at a useful moment for colonies building towards late summer.

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.
• BumblebeesBombusLarge, furry, loud, and cold-tolerant in a way no honey bee is. Bumblebees run annual colonies: a mated queen emerges alone in spring, founds a nest by herself, raises workers through the summer, produces new queens and males in late season, and then the entire colony dies except those new queens. They do make honey, in the strict sense of ripened nectar stores — just a few days' worth, because they have no winter to survive as a colony.
• Mining beesAndrenaSolitary ground-nesting bees, and the small volcano-shaped mounds of fine soil that appear on lawns and bare paths in April are theirs. Mining bees are the classic spring solitary bees of the northern hemisphere: short-lived, entirely harmless, often nesting in dense aggregations that look like a colony but are not, and a great many of them are specialists that visit only one kind of flower.
• Carniolan honey beeApis mellifera carnicaThe second most widely kept honey bee subspecies, and the one most European beekeepers choose over Italian stock. Carniolans come from the eastern Alps and the Balkans, and they are adapted to a short intense season: explosive spring build-up, rapid contraction in a dearth, frugal winter consumption — and a swarming instinct that gives beekeepers more work than any other trait.
• European dark beeApis mellifera melliferaThe honey bee that was native to northern Europe before anyone imported anything, and one that has been hybridised close to extinction across most of its range. The dark bee is slow to build, frugal, long-lived, and adapted to cold wet summers and long winters — traits that made it unfashionable when Italian stock arrived, and that look considerably more valuable now than they did in 1900.

Deciding between two of them

• Single-source vs mixed forest honeydew — Honeydew honey is sold both as a named species crop and as a general forest honey. The distinction is genuine and it affects both character and price.