Guatemala honey

How honey is produced here

Shade-coffee and cardamom plantations supply the principal flows, and the honey is a genuine smallholder income alongside them. Africanized bees dominate, which has shaped management practice throughout the region since the 1980s.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 3
• Citrus · 3
• Caramel · 2

Honeys from Guatemala

• Coffee blossom honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStrongly floral — jasmine and orange blossom over a light caramel base, with no coffee character whatsoever.
• Cardamom honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedGenuinely spice-scented — eucalyptol and a sweet resinous lift over pale amber sweetness. One of the clearest spice signatures of any honey.
• Tajonal honeyExtra light amber · MildBright and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint herbal edge — an approachable honey and the backbone of Mexico's export trade.
• Dzidzilché honeyWater white · MildDelicate and clean with a distinct light floral perfume and a faint citrus lift — refined in a way that most tropical honeys are not.
• Macadamia honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and nutty with a roasted depth and a butterscotch base — one of the few honeys that genuinely tastes like the crop it came from.

Plants behind these honeys

• CoffeeCoffea arabicaA heavy but very short-lived nectar source, in flushes rather than as a continuous flow.
• Green cardamomElettaria cardamomumA modest flow with an outsized agricultural significance: cardamom yield rises substantially where honey bee colonies are present, and estates stock hives for that reason.
• MacadamiaMacadamia integrifoliaA good nectar and pollen source over a defined spring window.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Mayan stingless beeMelipona beecheiiThe bee the Maya kept for two thousand years before anyone brought a honey bee to the Americas, and one whose management came embedded in a religious and calendrical framework rather than an agricultural one. Xunan kab — the royal lady — is a stingless bee kept in hollow log hives sealed at both ends, and its honey is thin, tart and used as medicine as much as food. The tradition very nearly ended, and its revival is as much cultural recovery as beekeeping.
• Asian honey beeApis ceranaThe western honey bee's counterpart across Asia, and a bee whose importance is out of all proportion to its honey yield. Apis cerana is the original host of Varroa destructor — the mite that has reshaped beekeeping worldwide — and it lives with the parasite without collapse. Understanding how is one of the more consequential open questions in apiculture.
• 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.

Honey in Guatemala

Part of the Maya stingless-bee region, where jobón log hives and the ceremonial observances attached to the colonies are documented alongside those of the Yucatán peninsula. The practice and its decline are shared across the modern national borders that cut through it.

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.

• Maya meliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · Practised, decliningKeeping Melipona beecheii in hollow-log hives across the Yucatán peninsula: a fully documented pre-Columbian apiculture with its own hive, its own ceremonies and its own colonial tribute record, now reduced to a fraction of the colonies recorded two generations ago.
• The jobónHive system · Practised, decliningA hollowed log section closed with discs at both ends, stacked horizontally on racks under a shelter. The hive of Maya meliponiculture, and a design that solves the specific problem of harvesting a nest built in pots rather than in comb.