Caatinga honey

How honey is produced here

Angico, jurema and marmeleiro supply the principal flows, following the rains. Cooperative organisation and organic certification are what make the export economics work, and the region also supports substantial stingless beekeeping alongside Africanized honey bees.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 4
• Resinous · 4
• Floral · 4
• Fruity · 2
• Woody · 2

Honeys from Caatinga

• 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.
• Angico honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, resinous and faintly smoky over a caramel body. A robust honey with more character than most tropical crops.
• Tepezcohuite honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and floral with a faint tannic dryness, reflecting the tree's very high tannin content. An agreeable everyday honey.
• 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.
• 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.
• Assa-peixe honeyExtra light amber · MildMild, clean and gently floral with a soft caramel warmth and a slightly herbal finish.

Plants behind these honeys

• 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.
• MarmeleiroCrotonA good nectar and pollen source in a semi-arid landscape with limited alternatives.
• MandacaruCereus jamacaruA minor nectar source and a substantial early-morning pollen one, valuable in a landscape where the dry season leaves very little.

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.
• 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 Caatinga

Beekeeping is one of very few dependable dry-season incomes in the sertão, and it requires no land clearance — which is the argument used to promote it against charcoal production and extensive grazing.