Madagascar honey

How honey is produced here

Litchi honey from the east coast is timed around a fruit crop grown for the European Christmas market, and niaouli honey comes from a naturalised Australian paperbark. Both are genuine smallholder incomes; neither comes from the endemic flora.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 3
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from Madagascar

• Madagascar litchi honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedOvertly aromatic — muscat grape and rose over a light caramel body. One of the more perfumed honeys in the catalogue.
• Niaouli honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedStrongly medicinal and eucalypt-like, with a camphorous aroma over an amber sweetness. Unmistakably a myrtle-family honey.
• Baobab honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and mildly tangy with a distinct citrus-sherbet lift over caramel — brighter and more acidic than most African honeys and genuinely reminiscent of the tree's fruit.

Plants behind these honeys

• LycheeLitchi chinensisOne of the most valuable subtropical orchard flows there is, and a crop whose yield rises measurably where colonies are present.
• NiaouliMelaleuca quinquenerviaA heavy and reliable flow wherever it grows, which is a substantial part of why it is tolerated in places that would otherwise remove it.
• BaobabAdansonia digitataA good nectar and pollen source for the brief period the flowers are open.

Bees associated with this origin

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.