China honey

How honey is produced here

Migratory operations move colonies through a national sequence — rape, milk vetch, acacia, lychee, longan, goji, jujube, vitex and tea. Both Apis mellifera and Apis cerana are kept, the latter particularly in hill districts where the terrain suits fixed apiaries better than migration.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 9
• Fruity · 7
• Vegetal · 6
• Buttery · 5
• Caramel · 4
• Herbaceous · 2
• Phenolic and medicinal · 2

Honeys from China

• Vitex honeyWater white · MildVery clean and mild with a light floral sweetness and a faint fresh herbal lift on the finish.
• Milk vetch honeyWater white · MildSoft, mild and slightly floral with a faint green-bean freshness — an unassuming honey made in enormous quantity.
• Chinese jujube honeyAmber · IntenseRich and dark with dried dates and burnt caramel, and a genuine bitterness on the finish that sets it apart from its Middle Eastern relatives.
• Lychee honeyExtra light amber · ModerateDelicately floral with a distinct rose-and-lychee perfume, and a clean sweetness underneath that keeps it from being heavy.
• Longan honeyLight amber · PronouncedIntensely aromatic — caramel, dried tropical fruit and a distinctive musky floral note that is unlike anything in the European catalogue.
• Loquat honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and malty with a distinct almond-marzipan note over dark caramel — one of the more aromatic East Asian honeys and far stronger than its pale-fruited source suggests.
• Tea blossom honeyExtra light amber · ModerateMild and creamy with a distinct faint bitterness and a green vegetal note that is recognisably tea-like — an unusual profile and a divisive one.
• Goji honeyExtra light amber · MildLight and clean with a soft red-fruit note and a faint herbal edge — mildly fruity rather than obviously berry-like.
• 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.
• Acacia honeyWater white · DelicateClean, light and sweet with almost nothing in the way. The honey to reach for when you want sweetness without a flavour opinion.
• Pear blossom honeyWater white · DelicateVery light and faintly green, with a clean sweetness and almost nothing behind it. Notable chiefly for how hard it is to get.
• Sea buckthorn honeyLight amber · ModerateSharp and fruity where berry juice has been added, and an ordinary golden coastal honey where it has not. The two are quite different products under one name.
• Oil-tea camellia honeyWater white · ModeratePale, thin and distinctly bitter, with an astringent tea-like finish. Not a beginner's honey and not really a pleasure honey.
• Pagoda tree honeyExtra white · MildLight, clean and gently floral with a faint green edge — an unassertive honey produced in very large quantities.

Plants behind these honeys

• VitexVitex negundoVery high nectar in a short window, from a plant that covers whole mountainsides.
• Chinese milk vetchAstragalus sinicusVery high nectar delivered at vast scale in early spring, and the anchor of migratory beekeeping across southern China.
• JujubeZiziphus jujubaA very high nectar source in arid and semi-arid country where the alternatives are few, which makes it structurally important as well as productive.
• LoquatEriobotrya japonicaAn outstanding winter nectar and pollen source in subtropical climates, and correspondingly valuable.
• TeaCamellia sinensisA good late nectar and pollen source, arriving when the season is otherwise closing.
• GojiLycium barbarumA useful nectar source over an unusually long season.
• 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.
• Black locustRobinia pseudoacaciaAn exceptional nectar source for a very short period. Pollen is useful but secondary — this is a nectar tree above all.
• PearPyrus communisPoor for nectar and good for pollen, which is exactly the sort of split a single bee-friendliness rating would erase.
• Sea buckthornHippophae rhamnoidesA genuinely useful early pollen source in a season when protein is scarce, and not a nectar plant at all. Honey sold as sea buckthorn honey is normally a blossom honey from the surrounding flora, or an infusion of berry juice into honey — both legitimate products, neither a monofloral.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in China

Chinese beekeeping is documented for well over two thousand years, and honey has a long place in Chinese medicine. Loquat honey is taken in winter for coughs, frequently combined with loquat leaf, which has its own traditional use.