The Canary Islands honey

How honey is produced here

Hives are carried into Teide National Park under permit for the retama flowering and removed afterwards, which caps production regardless of demand. La Palma maintains the Canary black bee in genetic isolation with restrictions on importing queens, one of very few places in Europe where such protection is enforced.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 3
• Mineral and saline · 2
• Caramel · 2

Honeys from The Canary Islands

• Tajinaste honeyWater white · DelicateDelicate and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint mineral edge from the volcanic ground — subtle rather than characterful.
• Retama honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and floral with a distinct honeyed-almond sweetness and a clean finish — one of the gentler European honeys, and unusually consistent.
• Avocado honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, buttery and molasses-rich with a savoury, almost salty edge. Nothing about it suggests the fruit.
• Fynbos honeyLight amber · PronouncedComplex and aromatic — herbal, faintly resinous and warmly caramelised, with a character that changes noticeably between producers.

Plants behind these honeys

• Viper's buglossEchium vulgareAmong the most productive nectar plants in the European flora per flower, and a good pollen source alongside it. In New Zealand, naturalised echium is a significant commercial honey source under the name blue borage.
• BroomCytisus scopariusZero nectar and very high pollen — one of the small group of plants including poppy, hazel and gorse that make the case for separate ratings unanswerable.
• 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.
• Iberian honey beeApis mellifera iberiensisThe honey bee of Spain and Portugal, and one of the more genetically interesting subspecies in Europe — it carries ancestry from both the western European dark bee lineage and the African lineage across the Strait of Gibraltar, in a gradient running from north to south. It is defensive, frugal, prone to swarming, and superbly adapted to a landscape of long dry summers.
• 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.

Honey in The Canary Islands

The tajinaste is a symbol of Teide National Park, which makes its honey a tourist product as much as a local one. The 2021 La Palma eruption and repeated Tenerife fires have both affected production directly.