The Himalaya honey

How honey is produced here

Altitude does what latitude does elsewhere — the flowering runs up the mountain through the season, and honey from above three thousand metres is a genuinely different product from valley honey a day's walk below. Rhododendron dominates the mid-altitude flora and brings the grayanotoxin problem with it.

Flavour signature

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

• Herbaceous · 4
• Caramel · 4
• Resinous · 3
• Smoky · 3
• Phenolic and medicinal · 2

Honeys from The Himalaya

• Himalayan cliff honeyAmber · IntenseStrong, dark and complex, with a bitter herbal edge and a slightly astringent finish. Spring harvests are frequently sharper and more bitter than autumn ones.
• Mad honeyAmber · IntenseBitter, sharp and astringent with a burnt-caramel edge and a distinct throat-catching sensation that is not a flavour but a pharmacological effect.
• Himalayan forest honeyLight amber · ModerateComplex and warm, with a herbal and faintly smoky character reflecting both the flora and the traditional processing — spring honey is lighter and more floral, autumn honey darker and more resinous.
• Chiuri honeyAmber · ModerateRich and slightly smoky with a nutty depth and a warm caramel base — one of the more distinctive Nepali honeys and considerably less known than the cliff honey.
• Tibetan highland honeyAmber · PronouncedDense and strongly herbal with a resinous depth and a faintly smoky finish — a concentrated honey that reflects both a short intense season and traditional processing.
• Mountain honeyLight amber · PronouncedAromatic, complex and warm, with a herbal-resinous depth and considerably more going on than a lowland multifloral. It tastes of a landscape rather than of a flower.

Plants behind these honeys

• Oilseed rapeBrassica napusTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, and delivered at exactly the moment colonies are expanding fastest in spring. Its faults are entirely about what comes after.
• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• ChiuriDiploknema butyraceaA valuable winter nectar source in the Himalayan mid-hills, where alternatives are scarce.
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• ThymeThymus
• 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.

Bees associated with this origin

• Himalayan giant honey beeApis laboriosaThe largest honey bee in the world, nesting on sheer Himalayan cliff faces at altitudes up to four thousand metres, and the source of the red honey harvested by Nepalese honey hunters descending rope ladders down rock walls. It was regarded as a high-altitude form of the giant honey bee until the 1980s and is now generally treated as a separate species, and it is the only honey bee adapted to genuine mountain cold.
• 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.
• 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.
• Giant honey beeApis dorsataThe largest honey bee in the world, and the one that cannot be kept. Apis dorsata builds a single enormous open comb hanging from a branch or a cliff overhang, defends it ferociously, migrates hundreds of kilometres seasonally, and has defeated every serious attempt to hive it. It produces a great deal of honey and all of it has to be hunted rather than farmed — which is why the honey it makes comes with rope ladders and night climbs attached.
• Dwarf honey beeApis floreaThe smallest honey bee, and the one that does its waggle dance the right way up. Apis florea builds a single small comb wrapped around a twig in a bush, and because the top of that comb forms a horizontal platform, the dancing bee points directly at the food source rather than translating the direction into an angle against gravity. It is the simplest form of the dance language and probably the ancestral one.
• 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.

Honey in The Himalaya

The range of Apis laboriosa, the Himalayan giant honey bee, whose open combs on cliff overhangs cannot be hived and which sets the terms of the cliff-harvesting traditions documented among Gurung and Magar communities. Wall hives built into houses, log keeping of Apis cerana and the spring honey associated with grayanotoxin all belong to the same mountain zone.

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.

• Himalayan cliff honey huntingHoney hunting · Practised, decliningHarvesting the open combs of the Himalayan giant honey bee from overhanging rock faces, on rope ladders, with fire and smoke, in mid-hill Nepal and adjacent ranges. The most photographed harvesting tradition in the world and one of the least accurately described.
• Mad honeyCultural use · Local living practiceHoney from rhododendron nectar carrying grayanotoxins, harvested deliberately in the Himalaya and the Black Sea region and used in small quantities. One of very few traditional claims about honey with a confirmed pharmacological mechanism, and a genuine poisoning hazard.
• Wall hivesHive system · Practised, decliningA cavity built into the wall of a house during construction, with a flight hole outside and an access panel indoors. Common across the Himalaya, parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and still occupied in older buildings.
• Keeping the Asian honey beeBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceLog hives, wall cavities and box hives for Apis cerana across South, Southeast and East Asia. A different animal from the western honey bee in ways that break European management assumptions, and the reason imported frame-hive advice so often fails.