Great Lakes honey

How honey is produced here

The lake effect extends the frost-free season enough to support fruit growing at a latitude that would otherwise not allow it, which is why Michigan grows cherries and blueberries at all. Basswood from the hardwood forests is the prestige honey.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 5
• Fruity · 3
• Herbaceous · 2
• Caramel · 2
• Vegetal · 2
• Nutty · 2
• Molasses and treacle · 2

Honeys from Great Lakes

• Basswood honeyWater white · PronouncedIntensely aromatic with a mentholated, faintly medicinal lift over a clean sweetness — one of the most distinctive American honeys and among the most divisive.
• Blueberry honeyExtra light amber · ModerateTangy and lightly fruity with a green, slightly astringent edge — recognisably related to the berry without tasting of jam.
• Cherry blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateMarzipan first, then a light stone-fruit sweetness — the almond note is the defining character and it is unmistakable.
• Apple blossom honeyExtra white · DelicateDelicate and lightly fruity with a soft marzipan note and a clean finish — recognisably spring, and gone if you are not paying attention.
• Carrot seed honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, savoury and faintly medicinal, with a green umbellifer note and a slightly bitter finish. A challenging honey and an interesting one.
• Buckwheat honeyDark amber · IntenseMalt, molasses and wet straw, with a savoury, almost animal depth. The most polarising honey in general production.
• Goldenrod honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong, warm and spicy, with a hay-and-clove character and a slightly astringent finish. Assertive in a way that surprises people expecting an ordinary golden honey.
• Milkweed honeyWater white · MildExceptionally perfumed for such a pale honey — a clean floral sweetness with an almost tropical lift. Regarded as a delicacy where it can be produced in quantity.

Plants behind these honeys

• LimeTilia cordataExtraordinary nectar productivity concentrated into a very short window. Its urban prevalence makes it disproportionately important to city beekeeping.
• BlueberryVaccinium corymbosumUseful early forage, and a textbook illustration that abundant flowers do not guarantee an efficient pollination relationship.
• CherryPrunus aviumImportant early forage arriving when colonies are expanding and bumblebee queens are founding nests. Almost all of it is consumed rather than stored.
• AppleMalus domesticaValuable spring forage, but rarely a surplus crop: the window is short and the colony is still building at that point in the year, so most of what comes in is eaten immediately.
• Crab appleMalus sylvestrisExcellent spring pollen and good nectar. Its particular value is the length of the flowering window relative to a cultivated apple.
• Wild carrotDaucus carotaModerate nectar and good pollen, in the most accessible form available — its value is the breadth of the visitor list rather than the volume.
• BuckwheatFagopyrum esculentumGenuinely useful as a late-summer gap filler, and its speed from sowing to flower makes it one of the few forage plants that can be deployed tactically within a single season.
• GoldenrodSolidagoTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, delivered at the moment they matter most. For North American beekeeping this is the most important single genus in the second half of the year.
• Common milkweedAsclepias syriacaA heavy nectar source and a poor pollen one, because the pollen is not loose — it is bound into paired pollinia that attach mechanically to a visitor.

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.
• Red mason beeOsmia bicornisThe bee in your bee hotel. Osmia bicornis is the commonest cavity-nesting solitary bee in northwest Europe, the one most gardeners actually manage to attract, and one of the most effective fruit pollinators known — a few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as thoroughly as a honey bee colony of tens of thousands. It is also, for practical purposes, incapable of stinging anyone.
• Mason beesOsmiaSolitary spring bees that build their nests out of mud, and the best orchard pollinators most gardeners have never noticed. A female mason bee works entirely alone: she finds a hollow tube, provisions a cell with pollen, lays an egg, walls it off with mud, and repeats until the tube is full. She will pollinate an apple tree several times more effectively than a honey bee while doing it, and she is almost incapable of stinging anyone.
• Tawny mining beeAndrena fulvaThe bright orange bee that appears on lawns in April and produces small volcano-shaped mounds of soil, prompting a great many alarmed enquiries about infestations. It is a solitary bee, it is entirely harmless, the mounds disappear within weeks, and it is one of the most conspicuous and most misidentified insects of the British spring.
• 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.
• 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.