Botswana honey

How honey is produced here

Mopane woodland dominates the north and east. Rainfall determines everything: the flowering follows the rains and a failed season removes the crop entirely.

Flavour signature

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

• Smoky · 2
• Caramel · 2

Honeys from Botswana

• Mopane honeyAmber · PronouncedDark and malty with a savoury mineral depth and a faintly smoky finish — closer to a European forest honeydew than to an African blossom honey.
• Sweet thorn honeyExtra light amber · MildSoft, floral and clean, with a faint almond note carried over from the flower's own scent. An easy honey and a very well-made one at its best.
• African acacia honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and spiced with a caramel base and a dry, faintly smoky finish — considerably more assertive than European acacia honey, which it is named after and resembles in no way.

Plants behind these honeys

• MopaneColophospermum mopaneModest floral nectar and a substantial honeydew resource, which is the reason the woodland supports beekeeping at all.
• Sweet thornVachellia karrooA major southern African honey crop and, in many districts, the single most important source there is.

Bees associated with this origin

• African honey beeApis mellifera scutellataThe tropically adapted African honey bee that, crossed with European stock in Brazil in 1957, produced the Africanized populations of the Americas. In its own range it is simply the honey bee of eastern and southern Africa — productive, mobile, defensive, and superbly adapted to heat, drought and a formidable list of predators including honey badgers, ants and hive beetles.
• Cape honey beeApis mellifera capensisA honey bee subspecies with a piece of biology that should not work and does. Cape worker bees can lay diploid female eggs without mating — thelytokous parthenogenesis, effectively cloning themselves — which means a worker can become a reproductive without ever becoming a queen. Introduced into the range of neighbouring African bees, that capacity turns into a social parasite that destroys colonies wholesale, and the resulting capensis problem has cost South African beekeeping enormously.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in Botswana

Within the Kalahari region where San honey gathering is recorded, alongside bees in southern African rock art and honey in San narrative. The ethnography is largely mid-century and what continues today is not established, which is why this site records the status as unknown rather than guessing.

Traditions documented here

How honey is, or was, obtained in this place. Each record names the communities it is documented among, the period the record describes, and whether anyone is known to be doing it now.

• San honey gathering in the KalahariHoney hunting · Current status unknownHoney gathering documented among San communities across the Kalahari and its margins, alongside an extensive southern African rock-art record showing bees, combs and gatherers whose relationship to that practice is not straightforward.