Nepal honey

How honey is produced here

Three systems run side by side: Apis cerana in log and wall hives in the hills, Apis mellifera in frame hives in the lowlands, and cliff harvesting of Apis laboriosa combs by rope ladder in the mid-hills. The last is a genuine tradition rather than a tourist performance, though tourism has begun to distort it.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 4
• Herbaceous · 3
• Smoky · 3
• Resinous · 2
• Phenolic and medicinal · 2
• Molasses and treacle · 2
• Woody · 2
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from Nepal

• Himalayan cliff honeyAmber · IntenseStrong, dark and complex, with a bitter herbal edge and a slightly astringent finish. Spring harvests are frequently sharper and more bitter than autumn ones.
• Mad honeyAmber · IntenseBitter, sharp and astringent with a burnt-caramel edge and a distinct throat-catching sensation that is not a flavour but a pharmacological effect.
• Chiuri honeyAmber · ModerateRich and slightly smoky with a nutty depth and a warm caramel base — one of the more distinctive Nepali honeys and considerably less known than the cliff honey.
• Himalayan forest honeyLight amber · ModerateComplex and warm, with a herbal and faintly smoky character reflecting both the flora and the traditional processing — spring honey is lighter and more floral, autumn honey darker and more resinous.
• Mustard honeyExtra white · MildVery sweet and very mild with a faint pungent brassica note when fresh, fading to clean blandness as it ages and sets.
• Jamun honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, tannic and astringent with a dried-fruit depth and a dry finish — noticeably less sweet than most honeys of similar colour.
• Tibetan highland honeyAmber · PronouncedDense and strongly herbal with a resinous depth and a faintly smoky finish — a concentrated honey that reflects both a short intense season and traditional processing.
• Niger seed honeyExtra light amber · MildGolden, clean and gently grassy, with a soft finish. Closer to sunflower honey than to the darker forest honeys of the same country.

Plants behind these honeys

• ChiuriDiploknema butyraceaA valuable winter nectar source in the Himalayan mid-hills, where alternatives are scarce.
• Oilseed rapeBrassica napusTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, and delivered at exactly the moment colonies are expanding fastest in spring. Its faults are entirely about what comes after.
• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• ThymeThymus
• Niger seedGuizotia abyssinicaA principal Ethiopian honey source and the reason the country's autumn crop is as large as it is, alongside the white honeys of the highland forests.

Bees associated with this origin

• Himalayan giant honey beeApis laboriosaThe largest honey bee in the world, nesting on sheer Himalayan cliff faces at altitudes up to four thousand metres, and the source of the red honey harvested by Nepalese honey hunters descending rope ladders down rock walls. It was regarded as a high-altitude form of the giant honey bee until the 1980s and is now generally treated as a separate species, and it is the only honey bee adapted to genuine mountain cold.
• 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.
• 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.
• Giant honey beeApis dorsataThe largest honey bee in the world, and the one that cannot be kept. Apis dorsata builds a single enormous open comb hanging from a branch or a cliff overhang, defends it ferociously, migrates hundreds of kilometres seasonally, and has defeated every serious attempt to hive it. It produces a great deal of honey and all of it has to be hunted rather than farmed — which is why the honey it makes comes with rope ladders and night climbs attached.
• Dwarf honey beeApis floreaThe smallest honey bee, and the one that does its waggle dance the right way up. Apis florea builds a single small comb wrapped around a twig in a bush, and because the top of that comb forms a horizontal platform, the dancing bee points directly at the food source rather than translating the direction into an angle against gravity. It is the simplest form of the dance language and probably the ancestral one.
• 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.
• African mountain honey beeApis mellifera monticolaA honey bee of the high mountains of East Africa — Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, the Ethiopian highlands and the Ruwenzori — living above 2,000 metres in conditions no other African honey bee tolerates. It is larger, darker, hairier and markedly gentler than the lowland African bee, and it has attracted breeding interest for exactly that combination.
• 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 Nepal

Cliff honey hunting among the Gurung and Magar communities is documented over generations and is bound up with ritual as much as with income. Mad honey — grayanotoxin-bearing honey from Rhododendron — comes from the same cliffs and is deliberately harvested and traded.