California honey

How honey is produced here

Every crop here depends on the preceding winter's rainfall, and drought years produce no crop at all. Chaparral honey production has been reduced substantially by the frequency and severity of wildfire, which removes both the shrubs and the apiaries. The almond bloom draws around two million colonies from across the continent each February.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 7
• Caramel · 5
• Herbaceous · 3
• Buttery · 3
• Spicy · 3
• Fruity · 2
• Nutty · 2
• Molasses and treacle · 2

Honeys from California

• Sage honeyWater white · MildMild, clean and slightly herbal, with a heavy silky body that is more of the experience than the flavour is.
• Star thistle honeyExtra light amber · ModerateLight and clean with a distinct anise-and-cinnamon lift and a fruity sweetness underneath. Delicate but not blank.
• Ceanothus honeyWater white · MildDelicate and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint spicy edge — mild, and rather more interesting than a pale honey usually is.
• Blue curls honeyWater white · DelicateExtremely delicate with a clean sweetness and a faint herbal lift — one of the mildest honeys there is, and prized for exactly that.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Almond blossom honeyLight amber · PronouncedDistinctly bitter with a marzipan aroma over it — one of the few honeys where bitterness arrives before sweetness, and an acquired taste even among people who like bitter honeys.
• Avocado honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, buttery and molasses-rich with a savoury, almost salty edge. Nothing about it suggests the fruit.
• Meadowfoam honeyExtra white · ModerateToasted marshmallow and vanilla, unmistakably. The one honey most people identify blind on the first spoonful, because it tastes like something they already know.
• Manzanita honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and faintly spicy, with a clean short finish. Interesting mostly for when it is made rather than for how it tastes.
• Safflower honeyExtra light amber · MildLight amber and mildly nutty, with a faint thistle bitterness at the finish. Unassertive and rather more interesting than most crop honeys.
• Carrot seed honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, savoury and faintly medicinal, with a green umbellifer note and a slightly bitter finish. A challenging honey and an interesting one.

Plants behind these honeys

• Black sageSalvia melliferaAn outstanding nectar source in a good year, and the backbone of the chaparral forage sequence.
• 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.
• Yellow starthistleCentaurea solstitialisAn outstanding summer nectar source in a season when Californian forage is otherwise very thin.
• RockroseCistus ladaniferAn outstanding pollen source and a good nectar one, and a plant that also supplies resin for propolis — an unusual triple contribution.
• ThymeThymus
• 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.
• AlmondPrunus dulcisTop-rated for both, at the single most valuable moment of the year for a colony coming out of winter. That is precisely why the pollination market exists.
• 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.
• AvocadoPersea americanaA heavy nectar and pollen source, and one the bees are notably unenthusiastic about relative to what else is on offer.

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.
• Leafcutter beesMegachileThe bees responsible for the neat semicircular notches cut from rose and lilac leaves every summer. A female leafcutter bee cuts oval pieces of leaf with her mandibles, carries each one back curled beneath her body, and uses them to line and seal a nest cell — the cells end up looking like small green cigars. The damage to the plant is cosmetic and the bee is one of the most efficient pollinators in agriculture.
• 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.
• Metallic green sweat beeAgapostemonBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.
• Blue orchard beeOsmia lignariaNorth America's managed mason bee, and the species increasingly deployed alongside honey bees in Californian almond orchards because it does something honey bees cannot: fly in the cold wet weather that February almond bloom routinely brings. A few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as effectively as a full honey bee colony, and they are sold as cocoons in a box.
• 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.
• Sweat beesHalictidaeThe bees that land on your arm in hot weather, and the group that breaks the tidy division between solitary and social bees more thoroughly than anything else in the order. Some sweat bees are strictly solitary, some form small colonies with a queen and workers, and a number switch between the two depending on latitude, altitude and season — the same species living socially in a warm valley and solitarily on the hill above it. They are also small, abundant, easily overlooked, and among the most important wild pollinators in temperate and tropical agriculture alike.

Honey in California

California holds around 1,600 native bee species, one of the richest faunas anywhere, and the tension between industrial honey bee stocking and native bee conservation is more visible here than in most places.