Iran honey

How honey is produced here

Iranian production is substantial by world standards and largely domestic. Astragalus honey from the Zagros highlands — from the same genus that yields gum tragacanth — is the distinctive regional product.

Honeys from Iran

• Tamarisk honeyAmber · PronouncedDark and mineral with a malty depth and a distinct faint saltiness that reflects the ground — an unusual and genuinely savoury honey.
• Ajwain honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedAromatic and faintly medicinal, with a clear thyme-and-caraway note over light amber sweetness.
• Milk vetch honeyWater white · MildSoft, mild and slightly floral with a faint green-bean freshness — an unassuming honey made in enormous quantity.

Plants behind these honeys

• TamariskTamarixA useful summer nectar source on saline and desert ground where little else flowers, plus a honeydew component.
• AjwainTrachyspermum ammiOne of the more useful spice-crop flows in northwestern India, and valuable for its timing as much as its volume.
• Chinese milk vetchAstragalus sinicusVery high nectar delivered at vast scale in early spring, and the anchor of migratory beekeeping across southern China.

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.
• 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.
• Egyptian honey beeApis mellifera lamarckiiThe honey bee of the Nile valley, and the subspecies depicted in the oldest images of beekeeping anywhere — the Fifth Dynasty reliefs at Abu Ghurab from around 2400 BCE show this bee being smoked, extracted and jarred. It is small, yellow, nervous and superbly adapted to desert heat, and it has been progressively displaced within Egypt by imported Italian stock.
• African honey beeApis mellifera scutellataThe tropically adapted African honey bee that, crossed with European stock in Brazil in 1957, produced the Africanized populations of the Americas. In its own range it is simply the honey bee of eastern and southern Africa — productive, mobile, defensive, and superbly adapted to heat, drought and a formidable list of predators including honey badgers, ants and hive beetles.
• 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.

Honey in Iran

Clay and pottery hives belong to the wider Near Eastern tradition documented here, and honey pastries finished with syrup are part of a technique family running across the region. Persian medical writing is among the traditions in which honey served as the standard vehicle for anything a physician wanted swallowed.

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.
• Honey and syrup sweets of the Middle East and North AfricaCultural use · Widespread living practiceA family of pastries and fried sweets finished with honey or sugar syrup across the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, Anatolia and the Maghreb — and an honest account of which of them actually use honey.
• 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.