Kazakhstan honey

How honey is produced here

Beekeeping is concentrated in the eastern mountains, where the Altai meadow flora supports the same honey Russia markets under the Altai name. Winters are severe enough that colony survival rather than summer yield is the binding constraint.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 3
• Caramel · 2
• Herbaceous · 2

Honeys from Kazakhstan

• Altai honeyExtra light amber · ModerateFloral, warm and complex, with a hay-meadow character and a long clean finish. A very good multifloral rather than a striking monofloral.
• Safflower honeyExtra light amber · MildLight amber and mildly nutty, with a faint thistle bitterness at the finish. Unassertive and rather more interesting than most crop honeys.
• Ak balWater white · MildMild, creamy and delicately floral with a faint herbal lift — the texture is much of the appeal, dense and smooth and dissolving rather than sticky.
• Sainfoin honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and softly floral with a distinct rose-and-hay note, and a thickness that gives it more presence than its flavour alone would.

Plants behind these honeys

• SainfoinOnobrychis viciifoliaAn outstanding forage plant on both counts, and one of the few that performs in a dry summer when white clover has stopped.
• Chinese milk vetchAstragalus sinicusVery high nectar delivered at vast scale in early spring, and the anchor of migratory beekeeping across southern China.
• Sweet cloverMelilotus officinalisVery high nectar over a long dry-season window, and shallow enough florets that honey bees can work it properly — which alfalfa, growing in the same fields, will not allow.
• Viper's buglossEchium vulgareAmong the most productive nectar plants in the European flora per flower, and a good pollen source alongside it. In New Zealand, naturalised echium is a significant commercial honey source under the name blue borage.
• Rosebay willowherbChamaenerion angustifoliumA major nectar source at a point in the year when many landscapes have gone quiet, and the mainstay of high-summer beekeeping across boreal North America and Scandinavia.
• 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.
• SafflowerCarthamus tinctoriusA modest but well-timed flow that fills a real gap in irrigated arid farming country.
• Red cloverTrifolium pratenseTop-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
• ThymeThymus

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.
• Carniolan honey beeApis mellifera carnicaThe second most widely kept honey bee subspecies, and the one most European beekeepers choose over Italian stock. Carniolans come from the eastern Alps and the Balkans, and they are adapted to a short intense season: explosive spring build-up, rapid contraction in a dearth, frugal winter consumption — and a swarming instinct that gives beekeepers more work than any other trait.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.