Great Hungarian Plain honey

How honey is produced here

Robinia pseudoacacia was planted across the plain from the nineteenth century for timber, sand stabilisation and — deliberately — for bee forage. The result is an acacia flow of a scale that exists nowhere else, over a fortnight in May, and a national industry organised around catching it.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 3
• Waxy · 3
• Buttery · 2
• Herbaceous · 2

Honeys from Great Hungarian Plain

• 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.
• Sunflower honeyExtra light amber · MildStraw, beeswax and pollen, with a slightly waxy mouthfeel and a fresh, faintly herbal edge.
• Meadow honeyExtra light amber · ModerateSoft, warm and floral with a hay-and-clover base — recognisably a summer field, and gentler and less resinous than mountain honey.
• Phacelia honeyWater white · MildMild, clean and gently floral with a faint herbal freshness — an easy honey with no rough edges at all.

When these honeys are typically harvested

Plants behind these honeys

• Black locustRobinia pseudoacaciaAn exceptional nectar source for a very short period. Pollen is useful but secondary — this is a nectar tree above all.
• SunflowerHelianthus annuusAn outstanding late-summer pollen source at a point in the season when pollen is becoming scarce, which matters for colonies raising the bees that will overwinter.
• Wildflower meadowMixed native floraThe highest combined forage value of anything in this catalogue, because of diversity and duration rather than any single plant's output.
• 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.
• DandelionTaraxacum officinaleThe pollen is what makes it critical. It arrives when colonies are expanding fastest and have the least in reserve, and bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation depend on early sources like this one to found a nest at all.
• PhaceliaPhacelia tanacetifoliaOne of very few plants rated top for both nectar and pollen, delivered late in the season when both are scarce. That combination is why it appears in nearly every agri-environment seed mix in Europe.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Great Hungarian Plain

Hungarian acacia honey holds a protected geographical indication, and the crop is close to a national emblem. That it comes from an American tree planted to hold down blown sand is a fact the marketing tends to leave out.