Egypt honey

How honey is produced here

Berseem clover, the irrigated winter fodder crop that underpins Egyptian agriculture, supplies the principal honey. Traditional horizontal clay cylinders allow a beekeeper to smoke the bees forward and take comb from the rear without destroying the brood nest — non-destructive harvest achieved three thousand years before Europe managed it.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 3
• Caramel · 2
• Malty · 2
• Molasses and treacle · 2

Honeys from Egypt

• Berseem honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint hay note — the archetype of an unassuming everyday honey.
• Cotton honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
• Tamarisk honeyAmber · PronouncedDark and mineral with a malty depth and a distinct faint saltiness that reflects the ground — an unusual and genuinely savoury honey.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Talh honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, thick and savoury-sweet, with dried fruit and molasses over a caramel depth. Nothing about it suggests the honey Europe calls acacia.

Plants behind these honeys

• Red cloverTrifolium pratenseTop-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
• White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
• CottonGossypium hirsutumA prolonged nectar source from two distinct kinds of gland, plus abundant pollen.
• TamariskTamarixA useful summer nectar source on saline and desert ground where little else flowers, plus a honeydew component.
• 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.
• Talh acaciaVachellia seyalA major dry-season source across the Sahel and Arabia, and the backbone of migratory beekeeping in Sudan.

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.
• Egyptian honey beeApis mellifera lamarckiiThe honey bee of the Nile valley, and the subspecies depicted in the oldest images of beekeeping anywhere — the Fifth Dynasty reliefs at Abu Ghurab from around 2400 BCE show this bee being smoked, extracted and jarred. It is small, yellow, nervous and superbly adapted to desert heat, and it has been progressively displaced within Egypt by imported Italian stock.
• African honey beeApis mellifera scutellataThe tropically adapted African honey bee that, crossed with European stock in Brazil in 1957, produced the Africanized populations of the Americas. In its own range it is simply the honey bee of eastern and southern Africa — productive, mobile, defensive, and superbly adapted to heat, drought and a formidable list of predators including honey badgers, ants and hive beetles.
• 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.
• Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
• 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.

Honey in Egypt

Egyptian records name beekeeping as a profession, honey appears in tax and temple accounts, and tomb scenes show hives moved by boat along the Nile. The bee hieroglyph formed half of the pharaoh's title for three millennia.