Ethiopia honey

How honey is produced here

Most production is still from traditional cylindrical hives of bark, log or basket, hung high in trees, and harvest destroys the comb. The highland mountain bee is markedly gentler than lowland African stock, which makes highland beekeeping considerably more approachable. Transition to movable-frame hives is a major focus of development work.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 6
• Floral · 3
• Smoky · 3
• Resinous · 2
• Woody · 2
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from Ethiopia

• Ethiopian white honeyWater white · MildClean, sweet and faintly herbal, with a smooth dense texture that dominates the impression more than the flavour does.
• Ethiopian red honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and warm with a malty depth, a resinous eucalyptus lift and a faint smokiness from traditional harvesting — an assertive honey that stands up to fermentation.
• Coffee blossom honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStrongly floral — jasmine and orange blossom over a light caramel base, with no coffee character whatsoever.
• African acacia honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and spiced with a caramel base and a dry, faintly smoky finish — considerably more assertive than European acacia honey, which it is named after and resembles in no way.
• Combretum honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramel-led with a dried-fruit depth and a faint woody dryness. A robust everyday honey rather than a delicate one.
• Niger seed honeyExtra light amber · MildGolden, clean and gently grassy, with a soft finish. Closer to sunflower honey than to the darker forest honeys of the same country.
• African stingless bee honeyLight amber · PronouncedSharp, fruity and faintly smoky, with the acidity common to all stingless bee honey. Descriptions vary widely because the species and the flora both do.

Plants behind these honeys

• CoffeeCoffea arabicaA heavy but very short-lived nectar source, in flushes rather than as a continuous flow.
• BushwillowCombretum speciesA major and under-documented African honey source, second only to the acacias across much of the savannah belt.
• 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.
• Niger seedGuizotia abyssinicaA principal Ethiopian honey source and the reason the country's autumn crop is as large as it is, alongside the white honeys of the highland forests.
• Oil palmElaeis guineensisA heavy year-round pollen source and a poor nectar one, which makes plantation apiaries protein-rich and carbohydrate-poor — a genuine management problem rather than a technicality.
• SheaVitellaria paradoxaA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the West African savannah.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• African mountain honey beeApis mellifera monticolaA honey bee of the high mountains of East Africa — Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, the Ethiopian highlands and the Ruwenzori — living above 2,000 metres in conditions no other African honey bee tolerates. It is larger, darker, hairier and markedly gentler than the lowland African bee, and it has attracted breeding interest for exactly that combination.
• Carpenter beesXylocopaThe largest bees most people ever see, and among the loudest. Carpenter bees excavate their own tunnels in dead wood using their mandibles — a remarkable feat for an insect — and the biggest species are the size of the top joint of a thumb. The violet carpenter bee, glossy black with iridescent blue-violet wings, is one of the most spectacular insects in Europe and is spreading northwards.
• 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.
• African stingless beesMeliponulaThe least documented stingless bees on earth. Africa has its own meliponine genera, harvested across the equatorial belt for honey valued well above Apis honey, and they are known largely from museum specimens and from the people who harvest them rather than from research.

Honey in Ethiopia

Tej, fermented from honey with gesho buckthorn supplying bitterness, is central to Ethiopian hospitality, ritual and celebration, and the majority of national honey production goes into it. Honey has functioned as tribute, currency and ceremonial drink for well over a thousand years.