The Caribbean honey

How honey is produced here

Jamaican production rests on logwood, brought for dye and left behind when synthetic dyes ended that trade. Cuban production expanded after 1990, when the loss of Soviet trade forced a shift away from agrochemicals and left the country farming in a way that qualified readily for organic certification. Africanized bees are now universal across the region.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 5
• Fruity · 3
• Caramel · 2

Honeys from The Caribbean

• Logwood honeyExtra light amber · MildLight and clean with a distinct floral sweetness and a faint caramelised note — one of the more delicate Caribbean honeys.
• Campanilla honeyExtra light amber · MildLight and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint tropical fruit note — approachable and pleasant rather than distinctive.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Coconut blossom honeyExtra white · MildLight, clean and mildly waxy with a faint nuttiness. It tastes nothing like coconut, which surprises almost everyone.
• Spanish needle honeyExtra light amber · MildLight, mildly fruity and clean. An easy, agreeable honey rather than a dramatic one, which is exactly what an all-year background source produces.

Plants behind these honeys

• LogwoodHaematoxylum campechianumAn excellent dry-season nectar source across the Caribbean.
• 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.
• Coconut palmCocos nuciferaThe most reliable background forage across much of the coastal tropics, precisely because it never stops. Coastal apiaries frequently rest on it between the seasonal flows.
• Spanish needleBidens albaAmong the most important sources in Florida beekeeping, and the one that carries colonies between the citrus, palmetto and gallberry flows.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Asian honey beeApis ceranaThe western honey bee's counterpart across Asia, and a bee whose importance is out of all proportion to its honey yield. Apis cerana is the original host of Varroa destructor — the mite that has reshaped beekeeping worldwide — and it lives with the parasite without collapse. Understanding how is one of the more consequential open questions in apiculture.
• Dwarf honey beeApis floreaThe smallest honey bee, and the one that does its waggle dance the right way up. Apis florea builds a single small comb wrapped around a twig in a bush, and because the top of that comb forms a horizontal platform, the dancing bee points directly at the food source rather than translating the direction into an angle against gravity. It is the simplest form of the dance language and probably the ancestral one.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in The Caribbean

Cuban organic honey is an unintentional product of an economic collapse rather than a policy choice, which is one of the more instructive origin stories in this catalogue.