New Zealand honey

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 7
• Floral · 6
• Buttery · 5
• Mineral and saline · 2
• Woody · 2
• Waxy · 2
• Herbaceous · 2

Honeys from New Zealand

• Manuka honeyLight amber · PronouncedEarthy, mineral and damp — heather-like without the smoke, with a faintly medicinal edge. Distinctive rather than delicious, and not what most people expect for the price.
• Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
• Pōhutukawa honeyWater white · MildMild and creamy with a faint salt-and-mineral edge from the coast, and a butterscotch note that emerges as it warms on the tongue.
• Rātā honeyWater white · DelicateVery delicate and creamy with a light butterscotch note and a faint mineral saltiness underneath.
• Kānuka honeyExtra light amber · ModerateSweet, clean and lightly aromatic, with a herbal-resinous thread that hints at its relation to mānuka without any of the medicinal weight.
• Rewarewa honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and burnt-caramel with a dry astringent finish — closer to a dark ale than to a floral honey.
• Blue borage honeyExtra white · MildClean, delicate and softly floral, with a thick smooth body that gives it more weight than its flavour would suggest.
• Kāmahi honeyExtra light amber · ModerateButtery and caramel-sweet with a faint herbal-resinous edge and a smooth rounded body.
• Five finger honeyExtra white · MildMild, faintly green and slightly waxy, setting hard and pale. A working honey rather than a prestige one.
• Towai honeyWater white · MildVery pale and delicate with a faint butterscotch sweetness — noticeably lighter and milder than kamahi from the same genus.

Plants behind these honeys

• MānukaLeptospermum scopariumA good nectar source during its brief flowering and of limited use outside it. A landscape of nothing but mānuka is a feast followed by a famine.
• White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
• PohutukawaMetrosideros excelsaA heavy summer nectar and pollen source on coasts with few alternatives.
• KanukaKunzea ericoidesAn excellent nectar and pollen source across the New Zealand summer.
• RewarewaKnightia excelsaA heavy nectar source in native forest, and an important one for the New Zealand forest bird community as well as for bees.
• 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.
• Five fingerPseudopanax arboreusThe principal winter forage across much of lowland New Zealand, and important to native birds as much as to bees.
• TowaiWeinmannia silvicolaThe first native forest crop of the northern New Zealand season, and one that is increasingly marketed on its own terms rather than blended.

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.

Honey in New Zealand

Honey bees were introduced in the nineteenth century; there were none before. Manuka honey has since made this one of the most commercially significant and most tightly regulated honey origins in the world, with a government definition setting chemical and DNA markers for export. Stingless-bee keeping does not occur here, and the native bee fauna is entirely separate from the managed industry.

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.

• Commercial pollinationBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceRenting colonies to growers for the duration of a bloom, under contract, at a price per hive. For many large operations it is now the main revenue line and honey is the by-product.
• Queen rearing and the bee tradeBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceProducing queens and bees as products in their own right — grafted queens, packages in the post, nucleus colonies — which is what lets an industry replace its losses on a schedule.

Deciding between two of them

• Mānuka vs kānuka honey — Two New Zealand scrub honeys from trees that grow side by side, look similar and yield honeys with almost nothing in common chemically. For years the cheaper one was sold as the expensive one.