Argentina honey

How honey is produced here

Argentine honey is overwhelmingly sold in drums for blending rather than under its own name, which is why a country producing at this scale is almost invisible on a shelf. Pampas clover and alfalfa give a pale mild honey that blends well, which is precisely the commercial problem.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 5
• Floral · 4
• Waxy · 3
• Vegetal · 3
• Herbaceous · 2
• Woody · 2
• Resinous · 2
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from Argentina

• Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
• Alfalfa honeyExtra white · MildMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
• Sunflower honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStraw, beeswax and pollen, with a slightly waxy mouthfeel and a fresh, faintly herbal edge.
• Eucalyptus honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWoody and faintly medicinal, with caramel and a cool eucalypt lift. More savoury than its colour suggests.
• Chañar honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramel-led with a distinct sweet resinous note — recognisably related to the pod syrup the same tree produces.
• Mesquite honeyExtra white · MildMild and smooth with a faint smoky-molasses note that arrives after the sweetness rather than with it.
• Angico honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, resinous and faintly smoky over a caramel body. A robust honey with more character than most tropical crops.
• Lemon blossom honeyWater white · ModerateBright, sharply citrus and clean — lemon zest and blossom rather than the softer neroli of orange blossom, with a genuine acidity behind it.
• Soybean honeyWater white · MildVery pale and very mild, with a clean light sweetness and almost nothing to distinguish it. Its virtue is neutrality.

Plants behind these honeys

• 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.
• AlfalfaMedicago sativaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
• SunflowerHelianthus annuusAn outstanding late-summer pollen source at a point in the season when pollen is becoming scarce, which matters for colonies raising the bees that will overwinter.
• 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.
• ChañarGeoffroea decorticansA short, heavy and locally important spring flow across the Argentine dry interior.
• MesquiteProsopisA principal desert forage plant, providing both nectar and pollen in landscapes with very few alternatives.
• AngicoAnadenanthera colubrinaA principal source of the caatinga honey that northeastern Brazil exports in quantity, much of it organic-certified.
• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• SoybeanGlycine maxEnormous in area and unreliable in yield. Where it does flow it is a genuine surplus crop; where it does not, an apiary surrounded by soybeans can starve.

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.
• Africanized honey beeApis mellifera scutellata hybridsThe most misreported animal in this catalogue. Africanized honey bees are ordinary western honey bees with African ancestry, and they differ from European stock in degree rather than in kind: they respond to disturbance faster, commit more workers to defence, and pursue an intruder further. They are not more venomous, they do not hunt people, and they make perfectly good honey. The name that stuck to them came from a 1970s press cycle, and it has outlived every attempt to correct it.
• 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.
• Leafcutter beesMegachileThe bees responsible for the neat semicircular notches cut from rose and lilac leaves every summer. A female leafcutter bee cuts oval pieces of leaf with her mandibles, carries each one back curled beneath her body, and uses them to line and seal a nest cell — the cells end up looking like small green cigars. The damage to the plant is cosmetic and the bee is one of the most efficient pollinators in agriculture.
• Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
• 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.
• 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.
• Common eastern bumblebeeBombus impatiensNorth America's commercially reared bumblebee, produced by the million for glasshouse tomato and berry pollination, and the continent's counterpart to Europe's buff-tailed bumblebee in both usefulness and controversy. It is abundant, adaptable and thriving while several of its relatives collapse — and its commercial rearing is implicated in some of those collapses.

Deciding between two of them

• Clover vs alfalfa honey — The two great mild legume honeys of North America and northern Europe. They are genuinely similar, and the differences are small enough to be worth stating precisely.