Crete honey

How honey is produced here

Thyme honey from the Cretan hills is the prestige product, with oregano and the endemic dittany as small and highly regional crops. The mountain flora above 1,000 metres flowers weeks later than the coast, which extends the season considerably.

Flavour signature

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

• Resinous · 4
• Herbaceous · 3
• Spicy · 2

Honeys from Crete

• Thyme honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm, herbal and savoury — thyme and dry stone, with a peppery lift and a very long finish.
• Oregano honeyLight amber · PronouncedIntensely herbal and warm, with an oregano-and-thyme aromatic over a caramel base and a dry, faintly medicinal finish.
• Dittany honeyLight amber · PronouncedIntensely aromatic and herbal with a distinct medicinal lift and a warm oregano character — closer to a herbal infusion than to a floral honey.
• Pine honeydew honeyAmber · PronouncedResinous, malty and markedly less sweet than floral honey, with a woody, slightly salty depth and no floral character at all.

Plants behind these honeys

• ThymeThymus
• MarjoramOriganum vulgareRepeatedly ranks at or near the top of controlled garden trials for total insect visits, and unusually it scores well for both bees and butterflies — few plants do both.
• Scots pinePinus sylvestrisNo floral nectar, moderate wind-borne pollen that bees will collect, and honeydew in very large quantities where the scale insect is established.

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.
• 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 Crete

Minoan Crete has produced some of the oldest direct evidence of organised beekeeping in Europe, including clay hives and the gold bee pendant from Malia. Dittany — Origanum dictamnus — is endemic to the island and carries a medicinal reputation going back to Aristotle.