Ireland honey

How honey is produced here

Production is small and almost entirely hobbyist, with the native dark bee — Apis mellifera mellifera — better represented here than almost anywhere else in western Europe. The Irish climate is the binding constraint: a wet July removes the main flow, and moisture content at extraction is a recurring problem rather than an occasional one.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 7
• Floral · 5
• Mineral and saline · 4
• Fruity · 3
• Waxy · 2
• Herbaceous · 2
• Vegetal · 2
• Woody · 2

Honeys from Ireland

• Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
• Ivy honeyExtra white · PronouncedStrong, faintly bitter and distinctly herbal — closer to a dark honey in character than its pale colour suggests.
• Blackberry honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWarm, mellow and gently fruity, with a soft jammy note and a hint of the fruit without any of its sharpness.
• Hawthorn honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong and slightly strange — marzipan and cut hay over a distinctly animal undertone that divides people sharply.
• Bell heather honeyAmber · PronouncedRich, warm and fruity with a caramel base and a distinct red-fruit note — sweeter and rounder than ling heather, and without its smoky bitterness.
• Heather honeyAmber · IntenseStrong, smoky and slightly bitter, with a lingering woodfire-and-toffee character. One of the most complex honeys produced anywhere.
• Hedgerow honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWarm, floral and slightly grassy, with a caramel base. A good hedgerow honey is a genuinely complex thing that happens not to have a Latin name.
• Sycamore honeydew honeyAmber · ModerateMalty and mildly sweet with a savoury, faintly smoky depth and a mineral finish — less resinous than the conifer honeydews and more caramelised.
• Balsam honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light pear-drop fruitiness and a soft floral finish — considerably gentler than its late-season timing suggests.
• Knapweed honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and rounded with a light caramel sweetness and a faint hay note — the flavour most people picture when they think of ordinary good honey, with a little more depth.

Plants behind these honeys

• White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
• BrambleRubus fruticosusThe combination of a very long season, high nectar value and reliability in variable weather makes bramble the workhorse of northern European summer forage.
• HawthornCrataegus monogyna
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• SycamoreAcer pseudoplatanusVery high nectar and good pollen, delivered at tree scale in mid-spring, plus a honeydew contribution later. A single mature sycamore is a serious forage asset.
• Field mapleAcer campestreVery high nectar from a tree most people do not realise is flowering, plus a honeydew contribution later in the season.
• IvyHedera helixOne of the very few plants that is top-rated for both nectar and pollen, and it delivers them when the year's other options have finished. For overwintering insects this is decisive.
• BlackthornPrunus spinosaGood for both at a moment when almost nothing else of tree scale is open. Its value is the date rather than the quantity.
• DandelionTaraxacum officinaleThe pollen is what makes it critical. It arrives when colonies are expanding fastest and have the least in reserve, and bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation depend on early sources like this one to found a nest at all.
• Himalayan balsamImpatiens glanduliferaOutstanding on both counts, at a time of year when little else offers anything. This is the whole difficulty.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Plasterer beesColletesSolitary ground-nesting bees that line their cells with a self-produced plastic. A female Colletes paints the walls of each cell with a secretion applied by her short forked tongue, which polymerises into a transparent, waterproof, cellophane-like membrane — a genuine biological polyester, and one of the most remarkable materials any insect makes. It waterproofs the cell against the damp sandy ground these bees prefer.
• European dark beeApis mellifera melliferaThe honey bee that was native to northern Europe before anyone imported anything, and one that has been hybridised close to extinction across most of its range. The dark bee is slow to build, frugal, long-lived, and adapted to cold wet summers and long winters — traits that made it unfashionable when Italian stock arrived, and that look considerably more valuable now than they did in 1900.
• Buff-tailed bumblebeeBombus terrestrisThe commonest bumblebee in Europe, the one reared commercially by the million for tomato pollination, and — as a consequence of that trade — an invasive species on several continents. It is also the bee behind the winter bumblebees now active through December and January in mild British cities, which is a genuine and recent behavioural change.

Honey in Ireland

Irish law protected bees and hives in the early medieval Bechbretha, the bee-judgements — a legal text devoted specifically to disputes over swarms, hive trespass and bee-sting liability, and one of the most detailed pieces of early European beekeeping law to survive.

Deciding between two of them

• Ling heather vs bell heather honey — Two honeys from the same moorland, six weeks apart. One is thixotropic, famous and expensive; the other is richer, more reliable and largely unknown.
• Ivy vs heather honey — The two late-season British honeys. One is a beekeeper's inconvenience that most people never see; the other is the most expensive honey in Britain.