Greece honey

How honey is produced here

Pine honey from Marchalina hellenica on Pinus brutia accounts for a majority of Greek output by volume, with thyme honey the prestige product.

Flavour signature

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

• Resinous · 4
• Malty · 3
• Woody · 3
• Herbaceous · 2
• Mineral and saline · 2
• Caramel · 2

Honeys from Greece

• Thyme honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm, herbal and savoury — thyme and dry stone, with a peppery lift and a very long finish.
• Forest honeydew honeyDark amber · PronouncedResinous, malty and mineral, with far less sweetness than its darkness suggests. Closer to treacle and pine forest than to anything floral.
• Oregano honeyLight amber · PronouncedIntensely herbal and warm, with an oregano-and-thyme aromatic over a caramel base and a dry, faintly medicinal finish.
• Pine honeydew honeyAmber · PronouncedResinous, malty and markedly less sweet than floral honey, with a woody, slightly salty depth and no floral character at all.
• Greek erica honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, malty and faintly bitter, with dried fig and caramel behind it. A robust honey and a distinctly autumnal one.

Plants behind these honeys

• Scots pinePinus sylvestrisNo floral nectar, moderate wind-borne pollen that bees will collect, and honeydew in very large quantities where the scale insect is established.
• ThymeThymus
• Silver firAbies albaNo floral nectar and negligible pollen. Its entire forage value is honeydew, which is why nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue — a single bee-friendliness score would make this tree look worthless.
• Norway sprucePicea abiesNo floral nectar. Honeydew is the whole of its value, and it can be very substantial.
• MarjoramOriganum vulgareRepeatedly ranks at or near the top of controlled garden trials for total insect visits, and unusually it scores well for both bees and butterflies — few plants do both.
• Greek heathErica manipulifloraThe most important autumn forage across much of the Aegean, and the reason colonies there can be wintered without heavy feeding.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Anatolian honey beeApis mellifera anatoliacaThe honey bee of central Turkey, and one of the subspecies at the heart of the species' evolutionary story — Anatolia sits close to where the western honey bee's lineages meet, and Turkey holds more honey bee subspecies within one country than anywhere else. It is hardy, frugal, defensive, and adapted to a continental climate of hard winters and hot dry summers.

Honey in Greece

Attic beekeeping is among the best-documented traditions of the ancient world: excavated ceramic hives, Aristotle's observations, and the honey of Mount Hymettus praised by writers as a named regional product — one of the earliest instances anywhere of honey valued for where it came from. Honey ran through Greek cooking and Greek religion at once, with the same cakes serving as festival food and as offerings, and chthonic libations poured for the dead. The movable-comb hive recorded here around 1800 is the European precedent for the modern frame hive.

Traditions documented here

How honey is, or was, obtained in this place. Each record names the communities it is documented among, the period the record describes, and whether anyone is known to be doing it now.

• Clay and pottery hivesHive system · Practised, decliningHorizontal cylinders of fired or unfired clay, stacked in rows and worked from the rear. The best-evidenced ancient hive on earth, for one reason: it is the only material that survives, so the archaeological record of hives is really the record of this design.
• Top-bar hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA horizontal hive in which bees build comb down from removable bars rather than into frames. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s as an intermediate technology, with a Greek movable-comb precedent from around 1800, and neither traditional nor a frame hive.
• Moving hives to follow floweringBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceCarrying colonies to successive flowerings — up a mountain, down a river, across a region — long before lorries. The direct ancestor of industrial migratory pollination, and a practice with a documented history in the Mediterranean, the Nile valley and Arabia.
• Preserving food in honeyCultural use · Local living practiceFruit, nuts and occasionally meat stored in honey, in several unconnected traditions, for a reason that turns out to be sound chemistry rather than folklore.
• Honey in ancient Greek food and drinkCultural use · HistoricalHoney in Greek eating and drinking: cakes for festivals and offerings, honey with cheese, honeyed wine, and a named regional honey treated as better than the rest.
• Honey in funerary practiceCultural use · HistoricalHoney poured as a libation to the dead, placed in graves and used in funerary meals across several ancient traditions — kept firmly apart from the much weaker claims about preserving bodies.
• Honey offerings in Greek religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney poured to the dead and to the powers below, honey cakes as offerings, and the priestesses and prophetic figures Greek writers associated with bees.
• Wax writing tabletsCultural use · HistoricalA wooden frame filled with wax, written on with a stylus and smoothed flat to be used again — the erasable notebook of the classical and medieval world.
• Encaustic paintingCultural use · RevivedPigment bound in hot beeswax and worked onto a surface. The technique behind the Fayum mummy portraits, which look startlingly present two thousand years on because wax does not yellow or crack the way oil does.
• Wax votives and figuresRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceWax objects left at shrines — limbs, bodies, animals, whole figures — offered for healing or in thanks. A devotional practice that consumed wax in quantity and is still carried on.
• Honey and wax in warCultural use · HistoricalHoney as ration and as wound dressing, wax in military supply, and the one well-attested case of honey itself disabling an army — set against the beehive-catapult stories, which are much weaker than their popularity suggests.
• Honey drinks without alcoholCultural use · Widespread living practiceHoney with water, with vinegar, with herbs, with milk or with citrus — a family of preparations that sat on the boundary between refreshment and medicine, and mostly on the medicine side.
• Honey on wounds and burnsCultural use · Widespread living practiceThe longest continuously documented medical use of any hive product, running from Egyptian medical papyri to modern licensed dressings — and the one where the gap between tradition and evidence is narrowest but still real.