The Balkans honey

How honey is produced here

The Balkan mountains carry some of the least agriculturally improved land in Europe, which supports meadow and honeydew flows that intensification has removed further west. Much of the production is small-scale and sold locally rather than exported.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 5
• Herbaceous · 4
• Resinous · 4
• Mineral and saline · 3
• Molasses and treacle · 2
• Woody · 2
• Smoky · 2
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from The Balkans

• Acacia honeyWater white · DelicateClean, light and sweet with almost nothing in the way. The honey to reach for when you want sweetness without a flavour opinion.
• Oak honeydew honeyDark amber · IntenseEarthy, salty and barely sweet, with a bitter-mineral depth and a finish more like a stock or a yeast extract than a sweetener.
• Linden honeyExtra white · ModerateFresh and cooling — mint, balsam and lime blossom, with a clean herbal sharpness no other pale honey has.
• Dalmatian sage honeyWater white · MildDelicate and clean with a faintly medicinal sage note and a light herbal finish — subtle in a way that rewards eating it plain.
• Savory honeyLight amber · PronouncedIntensely herbal with a distinct peppery, almost oregano-like bite over a warm sweetness — one of the more assertive Mediterranean aromatics.
• Metcalfa honeydew honeyAmber · ModerateModerately sweet with a distinct fig and dried-fruit character over a malty base — noticeably fruitier than the conifer honeydews and quite unlike them.
• Chestnut honeyAmber · IntenseAromatic, woody and unmistakably bitter — sweetness first, tannin second, and a long dry finish.
• Plum blossom honeyExtra white · MildLight, sweet and gently almondy, with a soft fruit note behind it. An easy honey and a short-lived 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.

Plants behind these honeys

• Black locustRobinia pseudoacaciaAn exceptional nectar source for a very short period. Pollen is useful but secondary — this is a nectar tree above all.
• English oakQuercus roburNo floral nectar and little useful pollen — the catkins are wind-pollinated and their pollen is collected only incidentally. The honeydew is the entire beekeeping interest, and stating that plainly is more useful than calling the tree bee-friendly.
• LimeTilia cordataExtraordinary nectar productivity concentrated into a very short window. Its urban prevalence makes it disproportionately important to city beekeeping.
• SageSalviaVery high nectar and only moderate pollen — sage feeds adult foragers superbly and contributes comparatively little to brood rearing, which is a common pattern in the mint family.
• ThymeThymus
• MarjoramOriganum vulgareRepeatedly ranks at or near the top of controlled garden trials for total insect visits, and unusually it scores well for both bees and butterflies — few plants do both.
• 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.
• PlumPrunus domesticaA useful early nectar source and a generous pollen source when colonies most need pollen for brood rearing.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• Anatolian honey beeApis mellifera anatoliacaThe honey bee of central Turkey, and one of the subspecies at the heart of the species' evolutionary story — Anatolia sits close to where the western honey bee's lineages meet, and Turkey holds more honey bee subspecies within one country than anywhere else. It is hardy, frugal, defensive, and adapted to a continental climate of hard winters and hot dry summers.
• Mason beesOsmiaSolitary spring bees that build their nests out of mud, and the best orchard pollinators most gardeners have never noticed. A female mason bee works entirely alone: she finds a hollow tube, provisions a cell with pollen, lays an egg, walls it off with mud, and repeats until the tube is full. She will pollinate an apple tree several times more effectively than a honey bee while doing it, and she is almost incapable of stinging anyone.
• Red mason beeOsmia bicornisThe bee in your bee hotel. Osmia bicornis is the commonest cavity-nesting solitary bee in northwest Europe, the one most gardeners actually manage to attract, and one of the most effective fruit pollinators known — a few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as thoroughly as a honey bee colony of tens of thousands. It is also, for practical purposes, incapable of stinging anyone.
• 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.

Deciding between two of them

• Acacia vs linden honey — Both are pale central European tree honeys with short intense flows. One tastes of almost nothing and the other is among the most aromatic honeys there is.