Namibia honey

How honey is produced here

Production is confined to the wetter northern regions. The Namibian bee is a heat-adapted African subspecies that forages at temperatures which would keep European stock inside, which is the only reason beekeeping is possible here at all.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 3
• Smoky · 2

Honeys from Namibia

• Mopane honeyAmber · PronouncedDark and malty with a savoury mineral depth and a faintly smoky finish — closer to a European forest honeydew than to an African blossom honey.
• Sweet thorn honeyExtra light amber · MildSoft, floral and clean, with a faint almond note carried over from the flower's own scent. An easy honey and a very well-made one at its best.
• Aloe honeyAmber · PronouncedDistinctly bitter with a warm caramel base and a faintly medicinal herbal note — the bitterness is pronounced and is the reason people buy it.
• African acacia honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and spiced with a caramel base and a dry, faintly smoky finish — considerably more assertive than European acacia honey, which it is named after and resembles in no way.

Plants behind these honeys

• MopaneColophospermum mopaneModest floral nectar and a substantial honeydew resource, which is the reason the woodland supports beekeeping at all.
• Sweet thornVachellia karrooA major southern African honey crop and, in many districts, the single most important source there is.
• Bitter aloeAloe feroxAn excellent winter nectar and pollen source in a landscape with few alternatives at that season.

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.
• Cape honey beeApis mellifera capensisA honey bee subspecies with a piece of biology that should not work and does. Cape worker bees can lay diploid female eggs without mating — thelytokous parthenogenesis, effectively cloning themselves — which means a worker can become a reproductive without ever becoming a queen. Introduced into the range of neighbouring African bees, that capacity turns into a social parasite that destroys colonies wholesale, and the resulting capensis problem has cost South African beekeeping enormously.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in Namibia

Part of the Kalahari and its margins, within the region where San honey gathering is documented in twentieth-century ethnography. The apparent continuity between rock art and recorded practice is harder to demonstrate than it looks and is not claimed here.

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.

• San honey gathering in the KalahariHoney hunting · Current status unknownHoney gathering documented among San communities across the Kalahari and its margins, alongside an extensive southern African rock-art record showing bees, combs and gatherers whose relationship to that practice is not straightforward.