Brazil honey

How honey is produced here

Africanized bees are universal, following the 1956 escape from a Brazilian breeding programme. Caatinga beekeeping is a substantial rural livelihood in a semi-arid region with few alternatives, and much of it is organised through cooperatives. Stingless bee honey is produced in tiny volumes at very high prices — a strong jataí colony yields around a litre a year.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 8
• Caramel · 6
• Fruity · 6
• Resinous · 5
• Citrus · 4
• Woody · 3
• Herbaceous · 2

Honeys from Brazil

• Assa-peixe honeyExtra light amber · MildMild, clean and gently floral with a soft caramel warmth and a slightly herbal finish.
• Marmeleiro honeyExtra light amber · MildLight and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint resinous edge from the scrub — approachable and characteristic of caatinga honey generally.
• Jataí honeyExtra light amber · ModerateSharply acidic and fruity with a fermented tang — closer to a sharp fruit syrup than to what most people expect honey to taste like.
• Eucalyptus honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWoody and faintly medicinal, with caramel and a cool eucalypt lift. More savoury than its colour suggests.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Tepezcohuite honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and floral with a faint tannic dryness, reflecting the tree's very high tannin content. An agreeable everyday honey.
• Angico honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, resinous and faintly smoky over a caramel body. A robust honey with more character than most tropical crops.
• Caatinga honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm, resinous and floral at once, with real complexity from a flora that exists nowhere else. Variability is inherent rather than a defect.
• Jandaíra honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedFluid, sharply acidic and aromatic — closer to a fruit vinegar than to honey as most people know it. That acidity is normal rather than spoilage.
• Uruçu honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedFluid, sharply acidic and floral — closer to a fruit syrup than to honey as most people know it, and the acidity is normal rather than spoilage.
• Mandaçaia honeyExtra light amber · ModerateSofter and rounder than the northeastern stingless honeys — still acidic, but with more caramel behind it and less citrus sharpness.

Plants behind these honeys

• MarmeleiroCrotonA good nectar and pollen source in a semi-arid landscape with limited alternatives.
• AngicoAnadenanthera colubrinaA principal source of the caatinga honey that northeastern Brazil exports in quantity, much of it organic-certified.
• TepezcohuiteMimosa tenuifloraA major dry-season source in Chiapas and in the Brazilian caatinga, and one that increases rather than decreases with land clearance — which is an uncomfortable thing to be able to say about a honey plant.
• MandacaruCereus jamacaruA minor nectar source and a substantial early-morning pollen one, valuable in a landscape where the dry season leaves very little.
• 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.
• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• Sweet orangeCitrus sinensisA heavy nectar source over a substantial period, and moderate for pollen.
• Southern beechFuscosporaNo floral nectar and negligible pollen. The honeydew is the whole of its value, and it is enormous — which is exactly why nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue.

Bees associated with this origin

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Orchid beesEuglossiniBrilliant metallic green, gold and blue bees of the neotropical forest, and the only bees that collect perfume. Male orchid bees gather volatile aromatic compounds from orchids, fungi and rotting wood, store them in hollow chambers in their swollen hind legs, and use the resulting blend in courtship — a behaviour with no parallel anywhere else in the animal kingdom, and one that hundreds of orchid species have evolved to exploit.
• JataíTetragonisca angustulaThe most widely kept stingless bee in the Americas and the easiest to recognise — a small golden bee with a wax entrance tube guarded by soldiers that hover in the air outside it, which almost no other bee does.
• Mayan stingless beeMelipona beecheiiThe bee the Maya kept for two thousand years before anyone brought a honey bee to the Americas, and one whose management came embedded in a religious and calendrical framework rather than an agricultural one. Xunan kab — the royal lady — is a stingless bee kept in hollow log hives sealed at both ends, and its honey is thin, tart and used as medicine as much as food. The tradition very nearly ended, and its revival is as much cultural recovery as beekeeping.
• JandaíraMelipona subnitidaThe stingless bee of the Brazilian caatinga, adapted to a semi-arid thorn forest where the flowering follows the rains and the dry season can last most of a year. Smaller than uruçu, and the species most caatinga meliponiculture is built on.

Honey in Brazil

Stingless beekeeping predates European contact and continues widely. Jataí honey has long-standing use across Brazil as a remedy for eye complaints and throat infections, and the bees themselves nest readily in walls and meter boxes in cities.