The Appalachians honey

How honey is produced here

Tulip poplar flows heavily in late spring and sourwood in high summer, which lets a beekeeper take two distinct crops from one location. Both are weather-dependent and both fail in bad years. The region also produces mountain laurel honey, which contains grayanotoxins and which beekeepers actively move colonies away from.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 3
• Spicy · 2
• Floral · 2
• Woody · 2
• Herbaceous · 2
• Resinous · 2
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from The Appalachians

• Sourwood honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedSpicy and aromatic — anise and clove over a caramel base, with a dry, almost tannic finish that stops it being merely sweet.
• Tulip poplar honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, buttery and malty with a smoky caramel depth and much less bitterness than its colour suggests.
• Basswood honeyWater white · PronouncedIntensely aromatic with a mentholated, faintly medicinal lift over a clean sweetness — one of the most distinctive American honeys and among the most divisive.
• Mountain laurel honey⚠Toxic: grayanotoxinsExtra light amber · PronouncedReported as bitter and sharp with a burning sensation in the throat, though the toxin is not reliably detectable by taste — which is the single most important fact about it.
• Persimmon honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and fruity with a dried-date depth and a warm caramel base — one of the more distinctive minor American varietals and genuinely reminiscent of the ripe fruit.
• Sumac honeyAmber · PronouncedTart, dark and lightly resinous, with a sour-fruit edge unusual in an American honey and a definite tannic dryness.

When these honeys are typically harvested

Plants behind these honeys

• SourwoodOxydendrum arboreumA serious nectar source with very little pollen to offer, which is a useful illustration of why the two are rated separately: sourwood feeds foragers superbly and contributes almost nothing to brood rearing.
• Tulip treeLiriodendron tulipiferaA heavy nectar source and a moderate pollen source, concentrated in a narrow late-spring window.
• LimeTilia cordataExtraordinary nectar productivity concentrated into a very short window. Its urban prevalence makes it disproportionately important to city beekeeping.
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• Bell heatherErica cinereaA good nectar source and moderate for pollen, over a long summer season on ground with few alternatives.
• American persimmonDiospyros virginianaA good nectar source where the trees are numerous.
• SumacRhus speciesAn underrated source, notable because it grows in exactly the marginal roadside and old-field ground that supports little else.

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.
• Sweat beesHalictidaeThe bees that land on your arm in hot weather, and the group that breaks the tidy division between solitary and social bees more thoroughly than anything else in the order. Some sweat bees are strictly solitary, some form small colonies with a queen and workers, and a number switch between the two depending on latitude, altitude and season — the same species living socially in a warm valley and solitarily on the hill above it. They are also small, abundant, easily overlooked, and among the most important wild pollinators in temperate and tropical agriculture alike.