Florida honey

How honey is produced here

Gallberry and saw palmetto carry the spring flows across the pine flatwoods, cabbage palm the summer, and Brazilian pepper the autumn. Citrus acreage has declined substantially to citrus greening disease, which has reduced the orange blossom crop. Hurricanes cause severe short-term losses to both mangrove and apiaries.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 5
• Fruity · 4
• Smoky · 2
• Spicy · 2
• Resinous · 2
• Mineral and saline · 2

Honeys from Florida

• Gallberry honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral warmth and a faint bitterness on the finish that the name hints at without quite delivering.
• Saw palmetto honeyLight amber · PronouncedSmoky and peppery with a warm resinous depth — an unusual and slightly savoury honey that divides opinion sharply.
• Cabbage palm honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, smoky and savoury with a mineral saltiness and only moderate sweetness — an unusual and polarising honey.
• Black mangrove honeyExtra light amber · ModerateLight and clean with a distinct saline-mineral edge and a faint smoky note — the salinity is genuine and reflects the tidal ground the trees grow in.
• Brazilian pepper honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and peppery with a distinct resinous spice and a faint tartness — genuinely reminiscent of the pink peppercorns the plant produces.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Tupelo honeyExtra white · MildButtery and clean with a pear-and-green-apple lift, and a long soft finish that never turns cloying.
• Spanish needle honeyExtra light amber · MildLight, mildly fruity and clean. An easy, agreeable honey rather than a dramatic one, which is exactly what an all-year background source produces.

Plants behind these honeys

• GallberryIlex glabraAn excellent late-spring nectar source across the southeastern coastal plain.
• Saw palmettoSerenoa repensA heavy spring nectar and pollen source across a very large area.
• Cabbage palmSabal palmettoA good summer nectar and pollen source, and a useful bridge across the southeastern dearth.
• Black mangroveAvicennia germinansA good summer nectar source in a coastal landscape with few alternatives.
• Brazilian pepperSchinus terebinthifoliaA good autumn nectar source at a point in the Florida year when colonies would otherwise be consuming stores.
• 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.
• Ogeechee tupeloNyssa ogecheExceptional nectar in a short window, in a habitat with little competing bloom at that moment. Its value is concentration in time and space rather than volume across a season.
• Spanish needleBidens albaAmong the most important sources in Florida beekeeping, and the one that carries colonies between the citrus, palmetto and gallberry flows.

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.
• Metallic green sweat beeAgapostemonBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.