Bangladesh honey

How honey is produced here

Sundarban mangrove honey is taken from Apis dorsata combs during a short licensed season, by mawali honey collectors working in a forest that also holds tigers. Mustard is the dominant agricultural flow, worked largely by Apis mellifera introduced for the purpose.

Flavour signature

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

• Fruity · 3
• Floral · 2
• Vegetal · 2
• Herbaceous · 2

Honeys from Bangladesh

• Sundarbans mangrove honeyExtra light amber · ModerateLight, tangy and faintly saline with a fresh floral character — considerably more delicate than its dramatic provenance would suggest.
• Mustard honeyExtra white · MildVery sweet and very mild with a faint pungent brassica note when fresh, fading to clean blandness as it ages and sets.
• Jamun honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, tannic and astringent with a dried-fruit depth and a dry finish — noticeably less sweet than most honeys of similar colour.
• Neem honeyAmber · IntenseDistinctly bitter with a herbal, faintly medicinal character over a restrained sweetness — one of the least conventionally pleasant honeys in the catalogue, and deliberately so.
• Karanj honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and herbal with a faint bitterness and a light caramel base — mild by Indian standards and more interesting than its modest reputation suggests.
• Mango blossom honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and fruity with a distinct tropical-stone-fruit note and a faint resinous edge — one of the honeys that does taste recognisably of its tree's fruit, though more faintly than people expect.

Plants behind these honeys

• NeemAzadirachta indicaA good dry-season nectar source across the Indian subcontinent.
• KaranjPongamia pinnataA good nectar and pollen source at the thinnest point of the Indian year.
• MangoMangifera indicaA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the tropics.

Bees associated with this origin

• Giant honey beeApis dorsataThe largest honey bee in the world, and the one that cannot be kept. Apis dorsata builds a single enormous open comb hanging from a branch or a cliff overhang, defends it ferociously, migrates hundreds of kilometres seasonally, and has defeated every serious attempt to hive it. It produces a great deal of honey and all of it has to be hunted rather than farmed — which is why the honey it makes comes with rope ladders and night climbs attached.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in Bangladesh

The Sundarban harvest is bound up with the worship of Bonbibi, the forest guardian, and permits are issued for a defined window each spring. Fatalities from tiger attack during the harvest are recorded annually.