Canada honey

How honey is produced here

Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba account for the great majority of the crop, from clover, canola, alfalfa and sweet clover. Per-colony yields routinely reach two or three times what a British colony gives, on long days rather than a long season — and the honey grades water white, the top of the USDA colour scale.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 8
• Caramel · 6
• Buttery · 4
• Waxy · 4
• Vegetal · 4
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from Canada

• Prairie honeyWater white · MildClean, mild and creamy, with a light floral sweetness. The reference point for what a great many people think honey tastes like.
• Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
• Rapeseed honeyWater white · MildVery sweet, very mild, faintly cabbage-like when fresh and cleanly bland once set. Texture is what it has instead of flavour.
• Alfalfa honeyExtra white · MildMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
• Sweet clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, sweet and hay-like with a soft vanilla note that is genuinely there rather than imagined — the clearest coumarin character of any common honey.
• Blueberry honeyExtra light amber · ModerateTangy and lightly fruity with a green, slightly astringent edge — recognisably related to the berry without tasting of jam.
• Cranberry honeyLight amber · ModerateTart and fruity with a genuine cranberry acidity — one of very few honeys where sourness is a real part of the profile.
• Buckwheat honeyDark amber · IntenseMalt, molasses and wet straw, with a savoury, almost animal depth. The most polarising honey in general production.
• Goldenrod honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong, warm and spicy, with a hay-and-clove character and a slightly astringent finish. Assertive in a way that surprises people expecting an ordinary golden honey.
• Fireweed honeyWater white · DelicateVery delicate, buttery and faintly tea-like, with a clean finish and almost no aftertaste. A honey that rewards attention and disappears if you are not paying any.
• Borage honeyWater white · DelicateVery light and very clean, with a faint cucumber-fresh note that fades with age. Sweetness without commentary.
• Red maple honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWarm and lightly caramelised with a faint woody note — a straightforward honey, and one that surprises people expecting it to taste of maple syrup.

Plants behind these honeys

• White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
• Oilseed rapeBrassica napusTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, and delivered at exactly the moment colonies are expanding fastest in spring. Its faults are entirely about what comes after.
• AlfalfaMedicago sativaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
• Sweet cloverMelilotus officinalisVery high nectar over a long dry-season window, and shallow enough florets that honey bees can work it properly — which alfalfa, growing in the same fields, will not allow.
• SainfoinOnobrychis viciifoliaAn outstanding forage plant on both counts, and one of the few that performs in a dry summer when white clover has stopped.
• BlueberryVaccinium corymbosumUseful early forage, and a textbook illustration that abundant flowers do not guarantee an efficient pollination relationship.
• CranberryVaccinium macrocarponA moderate nectar and pollen source, and one that honey bees are notably reluctant to work when anything else is available.
• BuckwheatFagopyrum esculentumGenuinely useful as a late-summer gap filler, and its speed from sowing to flower makes it one of the few forage plants that can be deployed tactically within a single season.
• GoldenrodSolidagoTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, delivered at the moment they matter most. For North American beekeeping this is the most important single genus in the second half of the year.
• Rosebay willowherbChamaenerion angustifoliumA major nectar source at a point in the year when many landscapes have gone quiet, and the mainstay of high-summer beekeeping across boreal North America and Scandinavia.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Italian honey beeApis mellifera ligusticaThe most widely kept honey bee subspecies in the world, and the golden-banded bee most people picture when they think of one. Italian bees were exported from the Ligurian valleys from the mid nineteenth century and now underpin commercial beekeeping across the Americas, Australasia and much of Europe — chosen for gentleness, prolific brood rearing and a strong disinclination to swarm.
• Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
• Mason beesOsmiaSolitary spring bees that build their nests out of mud, and the best orchard pollinators most gardeners have never noticed. A female mason bee works entirely alone: she finds a hollow tube, provisions a cell with pollen, lays an egg, walls it off with mud, and repeats until the tube is full. She will pollinate an apple tree several times more effectively than a honey bee while doing it, and she is almost incapable of stinging anyone.
• Early mining beeAndrena haemorrhoaOne of the commonest and earliest mining bees in northern Europe, and among the first solitary bees most people see each year. It has a neat combination of markings that makes it genuinely identifiable in the field, which is unusual in a genus of 1,500 species, and it nests in lawns and banks in loose aggregations.

Deciding between two of them

• Clover vs alfalfa honey — The two great mild legume honeys of North America and northern Europe. They are genuinely similar, and the differences are small enough to be worth stating precisely.