Mexico honey

How honey is produced here

Yucatán beekeeping is overwhelmingly with Africanized honey bees, which arrived in the 1980s and are now universal — beekeepers adapted by changing their handling rather than by replacing the bees. Tajonal supplies the bulk crop and dzidzilché the premium. Most output is exported in bulk to Europe and blended.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 6
• Caramel · 4
• Citrus · 3
• Fruity · 3
• Herbaceous · 2
• Resinous · 2
• Buttery · 2
• Woody · 2

Honeys from Mexico

• Tajonal honeyExtra light amber · MildBright and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint herbal edge — an approachable honey and the backbone of Mexico's export trade.
• Dzidzilché honeyWater white · MildDelicate and clean with a distinct light floral perfume and a faint citrus lift — refined in a way that most tropical honeys are not.
• Melipona honeyLight amber · PronouncedTart, complex and only moderately sweet — a distinct acidic tang over a floral base, closer to a fermented fruit drink than to honey bee honey.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Avocado honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, buttery and molasses-rich with a savoury, almost salty edge. Nothing about it suggests the fruit.
• Huisache honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrongly floral with a distinct violet and orange-blossom perfume over warm caramel — one of the most obviously perfumed American honeys.
• Mesquite honeyExtra white · MildMild and smooth with a faint smoky-molasses note that arrives after the sweetness rather than with it.
• Xtabentún honeyExtra white · ModeratePale, aromatic and faintly aniseed, with a clean floral lift. The liqueur made from it leans directly on that anise note.
• Tepezcohuite honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and floral with a faint tannic dryness, reflecting the tree's very high tannin content. An agreeable everyday honey.
• Scaptotrigona honeyLight amber · IntenseSharp, resinous and distinctly woody, with a fermented-fruit edge. Among the more challenging stingless honeys and one of the most prized within its region.

Plants behind these honeys

• MesquiteProsopisA principal desert forage plant, providing both nectar and pollen in landscapes with very few alternatives.
• XtabentúnTurbina corymbosaA short intense morning flow across the Yucatán scrub, worked by both honey bees and the region's managed stingless bees.
• TepezcohuiteMimosa tenuifloraA major dry-season source in Chiapas and in the Brazilian caatinga, and one that increases rather than decreases with land clearance — which is an uncomfortable thing to be able to say about a honey plant.
• 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.
• 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.
• AvocadoPersea americanaA heavy nectar and pollen source, and one the bees are notably unenthusiastic about relative to what else is on offer.
• CoffeeCoffea arabicaA heavy but very short-lived nectar source, in flushes rather than as a continuous flow.

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.
• Africanized honey beeApis mellifera scutellata hybridsThe most misreported animal in this catalogue. Africanized honey bees are ordinary western honey bees with African ancestry, and they differ from European stock in degree rather than in kind: they respond to disturbance faster, commit more workers to defence, and pursue an intruder further. They are not more venomous, they do not hunt people, and they make perfectly good honey. The name that stuck to them came from a 1970s press cycle, and it has outlived every attempt to correct it.
• Mayan stingless beeMelipona beecheiiThe bee the Maya kept for two thousand years before anyone brought a honey bee to the Americas, and one whose management came embedded in a religious and calendrical framework rather than an agricultural one. Xunan kab — the royal lady — is a stingless bee kept in hollow log hives sealed at both ends, and its honey is thin, tart and used as medicine as much as food. The tradition very nearly ended, and its revival is as much cultural recovery as beekeeping.
• Digger beesAnthophoraFast, furry, bumblebee-like solitary bees that hover in front of a flower before darting into it, and among the earliest substantial bees of the spring. The hairy-footed flower bee is the one most British gardeners meet — the females black and the males gingery, so different that they were long thought to be separate species — and it is a specialist of deep tubular flowers that honey bees cannot use.
• Metallic green sweat beeAgapostemonBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.
• 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.
• Scaptotrigona beesScaptotrigonaThe populous and pugnacious stingless bees of Mesoamerica. Scaptotrigona colonies run to tens of thousands of workers rather than the few hundred typical of Melipona, and they defend themselves vigorously — which makes them a very different animal to keep, and a considerably more productive one.

Honey in Mexico

The Yucatán has one of the oldest continuous beekeeping traditions in the Americas, originally with the stingless bee Melipona beecheii, which held sacred status in Maya religion and whose keeping was governed by ritual. Both traditions continue in the same landscape.