Chile honey

How honey is produced here

The Valdivian rainforest of the south supplies the distinctive native monoflorals, marketed increasingly as an argument for keeping the forest standing. Central Chile's fruit and avocado orchards supply the commercial volume and the pollination contracts.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 6
• Floral · 4
• Fruity · 4
• Buttery · 2
• Resinous · 2

Honeys from Chile

• Ulmo honeyExtra white · PronouncedStrongly perfumed — jasmine and orange blossom over butterscotch, with a creamy weight that carries it. Aromatic in a way very few honeys are.
• Tiaca honeyExtra light amber · MildSoft, floral and clean — gentler and less aromatic than ulmo from the same forest, and easier to eat in quantity.
• Quillay honeyLight amber · ModerateAromatic and warm with dried fruit and a resinous edge, and a faint clean bitterness that keeps it from being merely sweet.
• Avocado honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, buttery and molasses-rich with a savoury, almost salty edge. Nothing about it suggests the fruit.
• Apple blossom honeyExtra white · DelicateDelicate and lightly fruity with a soft marzipan note and a clean finish — recognisably spring, and gone if you are not paying attention.
• Raspberry honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and lightly fruity with a clean bright acidity — one of the few honeys where a taster unprompted names the right fruit.
• Eucalyptus honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWoody and faintly medicinal, with caramel and a cool eucalypt lift. More savoury than its colour suggests.
• Chañar honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramel-led with a distinct sweet resinous note — recognisably related to the pod syrup the same tree produces.

Plants behind these honeys

• 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.
• TiacaCaldcluvia paniculataThe second half of the Chilean native-forest season, extending the crop by several weeks after ulmo finishes.
• Southern beechFuscosporaNo floral nectar and negligible pollen. The honeydew is the whole of its value, and it is enormous — which is exactly why nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue.
• QuillayQuillaja saponariaA good summer nectar source in dry country, and one of relatively few substantial ones in central Chile.
• AvocadoPersea americanaA heavy nectar and pollen source, and one the bees are notably unenthusiastic about relative to what else is on offer.
• AppleMalus domesticaValuable spring forage, but rarely a surplus crop: the window is short and the colony is still building at that point in the year, so most of what comes in is eaten immediately.
• Crab appleMalus sylvestrisExcellent spring pollen and good nectar. Its particular value is the length of the flowering window relative to a cultivated apple.
• RaspberryRubus idaeusOne of the highest-yielding nectar plants in temperate horticulture, and good for pollen too. Very few plants combine this productivity with this reliability.
• ChañarGeoffroea decorticansA short, heavy and locally important spring flow across the Argentine dry interior.

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.
• Giant Patagonian bumblebeeBombus dahlbomiiThe largest bumblebee in the world — queens exceed 40 mm — and one of the clearest documented cases of a managed bee destroying a native one. Endemic to the temperate forests of southern Chile and Argentina, it was abundant within living memory and has collapsed across most of its range since commercial European bumblebees were imported for glasshouse tomato pollination in the 1980s and 1990s.
• 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.
• Red mason beeOsmia bicornisThe bee in your bee hotel. Osmia bicornis is the commonest cavity-nesting solitary bee in northwest Europe, the one most gardeners actually manage to attract, and one of the most effective fruit pollinators known — a few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as thoroughly as a honey bee colony of tens of thousands. It is also, for practical purposes, incapable of stinging anyone.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.