New South Wales honey

How honey is produced here

Commercial beekeeping here depends heavily on access to public native forest, and successive restrictions on that access are the industry's most persistent structural pressure. Beekeepers track eucalypt bud development a year or more ahead across hundreds of kilometres.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 15
• Resinous · 11
• Malty · 6
• Buttery · 5
• Woody · 5
• Floral · 4
• Phenolic and medicinal · 3
• Molasses and treacle · 2

Honeys from New South Wales

• Yellow box honeyExtra white · MildMild, smooth and lightly floral with a buttery weight and a faint eucalypt lift at the very end.
• Ironbark honeyExtra light amber · ModerateRich, buttery and dense with a warm caramel depth and a clean eucalypt lift at the end.
• Grey box honeyExtra light amber · ModerateClean and lightly caramelised with a faint buttery quality — mild for a eucalypt honey and highly regarded for its density and smoothness.
• White box honeyExtra light amber · MildClean and lightly caramelised with a faint buttery smoothness — mild, dense and highly regarded within Australia.
• Spotted gum honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramelised with a light resinous lift and a rounded finish — a middle-weight eucalypt honey and a very usable one.
• Blackbutt honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramelised with a light resinous edge — one of the milder eucalypt honeys and a good introduction to the group.
• Messmate honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and resinous with a malty depth and a faintly medicinal eucalypt lift — assertive and unmistakably Australian.
• Brush box honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint resinous edge — approachable and undemanding.
• Bloodwood honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and malty with a resinous depth and a distinct woody astringency — one of the more assertive Australian honeys.
• Stringybark honeyLight amber · ModerateFull and malty with a clean eucalypt aromatic edge and a slightly dry finish. A robust everyday honey by Australian standards.
• Paperbark honeyLight amber · PronouncedMedicinal and camphorous over an amber sweetness — a strong, distinctly antiseptic character that some people find difficult.
• Swamp mahogany honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong, malty and resinous with a lingering bitterness. One of the more challenging Australian honeys and a good one.
• Wilga honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and faintly spicy with a clean finish, and without the camphor edge that runs through the eucalypt honeys of the same landscape.
• Coolibah honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light caramel note and a soft buttery finish — undemanding and pleasant.
• River red gum honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong and warmly medicinal — the classic eucalypt register, with caramel underneath and a menthol lift at the end.
• Macadamia honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and nutty with a roasted depth and a butterscotch base — one of the few honeys that genuinely tastes like the crop it came from.
• Salvation Jane honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness — pleasant, unassertive and produced in enormous quantity.
• Banksia honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong, malty and savoury with a burnt-caramel depth and a distinctly salty-mineral edge.
• Sugarbag honeyLight amber · PronouncedSharply tangy and fruity with a resinous edge — often described as lemon-and-caramel, and quite unlike honey bee honey in every respect.

Plants behind these honeys

• 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.
• StringybarkEucalyptus macrorhyncha and related speciesOne of the mainstays of Australian commercial honey production, valued for both a heavy nectar flow and good pollen.
• PaperbarkMelaleuca speciesA reliable coastal and wetland flow across eastern Australia, and valuable partly because it occupies ground the drier eucalypts do not.
• Swamp mahoganyEucalyptus robustaA keystone winter nectar source for the whole east coast fauna, and a substantial commercial honey flow alongside that.
• WilgaGeijera parvifloraA dependable inland source when the rains have come, and one of the few trees that gives the western New South Wales apiaries anything at all in winter.
• MacadamiaMacadamia integrifoliaA good nectar and pollen source over a defined spring window.
• 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.
• BanksiaBanksiaTop nectar production in the catalogue for sheer volume per flower head, delivered in the Australian cool season when little else is open.

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.
• Australian stingless beeTetragonula carbonariaAustralia's social native bee, kept in boxes by a growing number of hobbyists and used commercially to pollinate macadamia. It builds a brood comb in a rising spiral — a genuinely beautiful structure unlike anything else in the bee world — stores honey in separate resin pots, and produces a tart, medicinal honey that Aboriginal Australians have harvested as sugarbag for many thousands of years.
• Blue-banded beeAmegillaFast, stocky solitary bees marked with brilliant iridescent blue or white bands, and among the most effective buzz pollinators anywhere. They grip a flower and vibrate their flight muscles at a frequency that shakes pollen out of tubular anthers — the technique tomatoes require and honey bees cannot perform — which has made them the subject of serious commercial pollination research in Australia.
• 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.
• Leafcutter beesMegachileThe bees responsible for the neat semicircular notches cut from rose and lilac leaves every summer. A female leafcutter bee cuts oval pieces of leaf with her mandibles, carries each one back curled beneath her body, and uses them to line and seal a nest cell — the cells end up looking like small green cigars. The damage to the plant is cosmetic and the bee is one of the most efficient pollinators in agriculture.
• 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.