Israel honey

How honey is produced here

Citrus from the coastal plain and eucalyptus planted for drainage and windbreaks supply most of the crop. Colonies are moved for pollination contracts as much as for honey.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 2
• Woody · 2

Honeys from Israel

• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• River red gum honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong and warmly medicinal — the classic eucalypt register, with caramel underneath and a menthol lift at the end.
• Tamarisk honeyAmber · PronouncedDark and mineral with a malty depth and a distinct faint saltiness that reflects the ground — an unusual and genuinely savoury honey.
• Eucalyptus honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWoody and faintly medicinal, with caramel and a cool eucalypt lift. More savoury than its colour suggests.

Plants behind these honeys

• EucalyptusEucalyptusProlific in both nectar and pollen when flowering, though the pollen of some species is nutritionally poor for honey bees, and colonies confined to a single eucalypt species can suffer over time despite abundant forage.
• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• Sweet orangeCitrus sinensisA heavy nectar source over a substantial period, and moderate for pollen.
• TamariskTamarixA useful summer nectar source on saline and desert ground where little else flowers, plus a honeydew component.

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.
• 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.

Honey in Israel

The Tel Rehov apiary, excavated in the 2000s and dated to around the tenth to ninth century BCE, held over a hundred cylindrical clay hives arranged in rows — the earliest large-scale organised beekeeping installation found anywhere. The bees, from wing analysis, appear to have been imported from Anatolia.