Mongolia honey

How honey is produced here

Beekeeping is recent and largely development-driven. Sea buckthorn is grown at scale for the berry and contributes pollen rather than nectar; the honey comes from the steppe and river-valley flora around the plantations.

Flavour signature

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

• Fruity · 2
• Caramel · 2
• Floral · 2

Honeys from Mongolia

• Sea buckthorn honeyLight amber · ModerateSharp and fruity where berry juice has been added, and an ordinary golden coastal honey where it has not. The two are quite different products under one name.
• Goji honeyExtra light amber · MildLight and clean with a soft red-fruit note and a faint herbal edge — mildly fruity rather than obviously berry-like.
• 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.

Plants behind these honeys

• Sea buckthornHippophae rhamnoidesA genuinely useful early pollen source in a season when protein is scarce, and not a nectar plant at all. Honey sold as sea buckthorn honey is normally a blossom honey from the surrounding flora, or an infusion of berry juice into honey — both legitimate products, neither a monofloral.
• GojiLycium barbarumA useful nectar source over an unusually long season.
• SainfoinOnobrychis viciifoliaAn outstanding forage plant on both counts, and one of the few that performs in a dry summer when white clover has stopped.
• 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.
• Chinese milk vetchAstragalus sinicusVery high nectar delivered at vast scale in early spring, and the anchor of migratory beekeeping across southern China.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• Asian honey beeApis ceranaThe western honey bee's counterpart across Asia, and a bee whose importance is out of all proportion to its honey yield. Apis cerana is the original host of Varroa destructor — the mite that has reshaped beekeeping worldwide — and it lives with the parasite without collapse. Understanding how is one of the more consequential open questions in apiculture.
• 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.