Italy honey

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 7
• Vegetal · 5
• Fruity · 4
• Nutty · 3
• Phenolic and medicinal · 3
• Woody · 2
• Smoky · 2
• Buttery · 2

Honeys from Italy

• Chestnut honeyAmber · IntenseAromatic, woody and unmistakably bitter — sweetness first, tannin second, and a long dry finish.
• Acacia honeyWater white · DelicateClean, light and sweet with almost nothing in the way. The honey to reach for when you want sweetness without a flavour opinion.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Strawberry tree honeyAmber · IntenseAggressively bitter — coffee grounds, artichoke and burnt sugar, with the sweetness arriving late and briefly. Nothing in food prepares most people for it.
• Sulla honeyWater white · DelicateVery delicate and clean, with a soft almond-and-fresh-grass note and almost no aftertaste.
• Asphodel honeyWater white · DelicateDelicate and softly perfumed with a fresh, almost vegetal lift and a silky weight that gives it more presence than the flavour alone would.
• Lemon blossom honeyWater white · ModerateBright, sharply citrus and clean — lemon zest and blossom rather than the softer neroli of orange blossom, with a genuine acidity behind it.
• Thistle honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWarm and herbaceous with a hay-and-spice character and a faint bitterness at the end.
• Pear blossom honeyWater white · DelicateVery light and faintly green, with a clean sweetness and almost nothing behind it. Notable chiefly for how hard it is to get.
• Cardoon honeyLight amber · PronouncedSavoury and faintly bitter, with a warm caramel body and an unmistakable green-vegetable note that is genuinely artichoke-like.
• Ailanthus honeyLight amber · IntenseIntensely aromatic — muscat grape and elderflower with a medicinal edge. It divides opinion more sharply than any other European honey.

Plants behind these honeys

• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• ThistleGalactites tomentosaAmong the most productive nectar plants in Mediterranean grassland, and one of the few that supports butterflies and bees equally well.
• Sweet chestnutCastanea sativaAn exceptional pollen source — the catkins shed enormous quantities — and a good nectar source in the right weather. The pollen arrives at a useful moment for colonies building towards late summer.
• Black locustRobinia pseudoacaciaAn exceptional nectar source for a very short period. Pollen is useful but secondary — this is a nectar tree above all.
• Sweet orangeCitrus sinensisA heavy nectar source over a substantial period, and moderate for pollen.
• Strawberry treeArbutus unedoValuable out of all proportion to its abundance, because of when it flowers. Late nectar lets colonies enter winter with fresh stores in a landscape that has otherwise shut down.
• AsphodelAsphodelus ramosusA major early nectar source in country that offers little else at that season, and rated highly for pollen as well.
• PearPyrus communisPoor for nectar and good for pollen, which is exactly the sort of split a single bee-friendliness rating would erase.
• Globe artichokeCynara cardunculusAn outstanding nectar and pollen source, and one of the single most productive flowers in a garden.
• Tree of heavenAilanthus altissimaA heavy urban and post-industrial nectar source, and an uncomfortable one: the same qualities that make it valuable to bees make it a landscape problem.

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.
• Italian honey beeApis mellifera ligusticaThe most widely kept honey bee subspecies in the world, and the golden-banded bee most people picture when they think of one. Italian bees were exported from the Ligurian valleys from the mid nineteenth century and now underpin commercial beekeeping across the Americas, Australasia and much of Europe — chosen for gentleness, prolific brood rearing and a strong disinclination to swarm.
• 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.
• Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
• Mason beesOsmiaSolitary spring bees that build their nests out of mud, and the best orchard pollinators most gardeners have never noticed. A female mason bee works entirely alone: she finds a hollow tube, provisions a cell with pollen, lays an egg, walls it off with mud, and repeats until the tube is full. She will pollinate an apple tree several times more effectively than a honey bee while doing it, and she is almost incapable of stinging anyone.
• 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.

Honey in Italy

Roman agricultural writers treated the apiary as a component of a profitable estate and left the most practical surviving ancient account of beekeeping, while the recipe collection known as Apicius shows honey used throughout the kitchen and largely in savoury dishes. Italy is also where much later beekeeping meets art and devotion: encaustic painting, wax votives and the liturgical demand for beeswax candles that shaped medieval European beekeeping. The Italian honey bee has been exported worldwide as breeding stock.

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.

• Cork hivesHive system · Practised, decliningCylinders of cork bark, used across the western Mediterranean wherever cork oak is worked. Excellent insulation, effectively free where the forestry already exists, and a good illustration of hive design following local material.
• Preserving food in honeyCultural use · Local living practiceFruit, nuts and occasionally meat stored in honey, in several unconnected traditions, for a reason that turns out to be sound chemistry rather than folklore.
• Honey in Roman cookingCultural use · HistoricalHoney as a routine kitchen ingredient in Roman cooking, used in savoury dishes as freely as in sweet ones, and documented in the largest surviving body of ancient recipes.
• Beeswax in Christian liturgyRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceThe requirement that liturgical candles be made of beeswax, the Easter proclamation that praises the bees who made it, and the enormous demand that requirement placed on medieval beekeeping.
• Beeswax candlesCultural use · Local living practiceThe largest single use of a bee product in European history: candles that burned clean enough for indoor use, made by a regulated trade, and demanded in quantity by the church.
• Wax writing tabletsCultural use · HistoricalA wooden frame filled with wax, written on with a stylus and smoothed flat to be used again — the erasable notebook of the classical and medieval world.
• Wax seals and sealingCultural use · HistoricalWax pressed with a matrix to authenticate a document or close a container — an authentication technology that worked because breaking it was obvious and forging it was hard.
• Encaustic paintingCultural use · RevivedPigment bound in hot beeswax and worked onto a surface. The technique behind the Fayum mummy portraits, which look startlingly present two thousand years on because wax does not yellow or crack the way oil does.
• Wax votives and figuresRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceWax objects left at shrines — limbs, bodies, animals, whole figures — offered for healing or in thanks. A devotional practice that consumed wax in quantity and is still carried on.
• Honey and wax in warCultural use · HistoricalHoney as ration and as wound dressing, wax in military supply, and the one well-attested case of honey itself disabling an army — set against the beehive-catapult stories, which are much weaker than their popularity suggests.
• Queen rearing and the bee tradeBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceProducing queens and bees as products in their own right — grafted queens, packages in the post, nucleus colonies — which is what lets an industry replace its losses on a schedule.

Deciding between two of them

• Chestnut vs strawberry tree honey — The two great bitter honeys of Europe. One is widely available and a good introduction; the other is the most bitter honey in production and divides people completely.
• Orange vs lemon blossom honey — Two citrus honeys from the same orchards, and the difference is sharper than the shared category suggests: one is perfumed and the other is bright.