South Island, New Zealand honey

How honey is produced here

Scale insects embedded in southern beech bark extrude honeydew droplets in such quantity that the forest smells of sugar. Bees, native birds and introduced Vespula wasps all compete for it, and the wasps consume a very large share. Central Otago is the driest inhabited part of New Zealand, which gives its thyme honey a very low moisture content.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 4
• Floral · 4
• Buttery · 3
• Resinous · 2
• Herbaceous · 2
• Waxy · 2

Honeys from South Island, New Zealand

• Beech honeydew honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and malty with a resinous depth, a low sweetness and a distinctly savoury mineral finish — a serious honey, and quite unlike anything else New Zealand produces.
• Central Otago thyme honeyLight amber · PronouncedIntensely aromatic and herbal with a warm thyme character and a long savoury finish — closely comparable to a good Greek thyme honey, which surprises most people.
• Rātā honeyWater white · DelicateVery delicate and creamy with a light butterscotch note and a faint mineral saltiness underneath.
• Kāmahi honeyExtra light amber · ModerateButtery and caramel-sweet with a faint herbal-resinous edge and a smooth rounded body.
• Blue borage honeyExtra white · MildClean, delicate and softly floral, with a thick smooth body that gives it more weight than its flavour would suggest.
• 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.
• Five finger honeyExtra white · MildMild, faintly green and slightly waxy, setting hard and pale. A working honey rather than a prestige one.

Plants behind these honeys

• Southern beechFuscosporaNo floral nectar and negligible pollen. The honeydew is the whole of its value, and it is enormous — which is exactly why nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue.
• ThymeThymus
• 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.
• 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.
• Five fingerPseudopanax arboreusThe principal winter forage across much of lowland New Zealand, and important to native birds as much as to bees.

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.
• 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.

Honey in South Island, New Zealand

The Central Otago thyme descends from plants brought by gold miners in the 1860s. The gold has gone and the thyme has covered the schist hills ever since.