Nigeria honey

How honey is produced here

Production is overwhelmingly informal and adulteration of retail honey is a well-documented domestic problem. Shea parkland in the middle belt is the most significant forage resource and exists for the nut rather than the honey.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 3
• Nutty · 2
• Floral · 2

Honeys from Nigeria

• Shea honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and buttery with a nutty depth and a light caramel base — a rounded, approachable honey with a distinct richness.
• Sesame honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a distinct toasted-nut note and a light caramel base — the nutty character is genuine rather than suggested by the name.
• Oil palm honeyLight amber · ModerateVariable by definition. Generally warm and mildly caramel-led, taking its character from whatever grew between and around the palms.

Plants behind these honeys

• SheaVitellaria paradoxaA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the West African savannah.
• SesameSesamum indicumA good nectar and pollen source, and unusual in offering nectar from two different kinds of gland.
• Oil palmElaeis guineensisA heavy year-round pollen source and a poor nectar one, which makes plantation apiaries protein-rich and carbohydrate-poor — a genuine management problem rather than a technicality.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Sweat beesHalictidaeThe bees that land on your arm in hot weather, and the group that breaks the tidy division between solitary and social bees more thoroughly than anything else in the order. Some sweat bees are strictly solitary, some form small colonies with a queen and workers, and a number switch between the two depending on latitude, altitude and season — the same species living socially in a warm valley and solitarily on the hill above it. They are also small, abundant, easily overlooked, and among the most important wild pollinators in temperate and tropical agriculture alike.
• 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 Nigeria

Gourd, basket and pot hives are among the commonest hive forms here, and West African lost-wax casting — the tradition behind the Ife and Benin bronzes — implies beeswax supplies and therefore bee economies that are studied far less than the objects they made possible. Wax-resist dyeing is also practised, distinct from the printed cloth sold as wax print.

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.

• Gourd, basket and improvised hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceWhatever holds a cavity. Gourds, coiled baskets sealed with dung, upturned pots, oil drums and packing cases are the commonest hives in several countries and almost never appear in accounts of traditional beekeeping.
• African stingless bee harvestingStingless-bee keeping · Practised, decliningMeliponula and related genera harvested from ground and tree nests across sub-Saharan Africa, valued medicinally and priced well above Apis honey, and almost entirely absent from the international meliponiculture literature.
• Lost-wax castingCultural use · Widespread living practiceModelling an object in wax, encasing it, melting the wax out and pouring metal into the space it leaves. One of the oldest metalworking techniques, still in use, and responsible for a large share of the world's surviving ancient bronze sculpture.
• Wax-resist dyeingCultural use · Widespread living practiceWax drawn or stamped onto cloth so that dye cannot reach it, then removed to leave a pattern. A living industrial demand for beeswax that almost no consumer connects to bees.