North America honey

How honey is produced here

Migratory pollination at industrial scale is the defining feature, with around two million colonies moved to Californian almonds for three weeks each February in the largest managed pollination event anywhere. Regional varietals depend on short flows in restricted areas and fail completely in bad years.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 15
• Caramel · 9
• Buttery · 8
• Fruity · 7
• Vegetal · 5
• Waxy · 4
• Herbaceous · 4
• Spicy · 4

Honeys from North America

• 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.
• Alfalfa honeyExtra white · MildMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
• Basswood honeyWater white · PronouncedIntensely aromatic with a mentholated, faintly medicinal lift over a clean sweetness — one of the most distinctive American honeys and among the most divisive.
• Sourwood honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedSpicy and aromatic — anise and clove over a caramel base, with a dry, almost tannic finish that stops it being merely sweet.
• Tupelo honeyExtra white · MildButtery and clean with a pear-and-green-apple lift, and a long soft finish that never turns cloying.
• Sage honeyWater white · MildMild, clean and slightly herbal, with a heavy silky body that is more of the experience than the flavour is.
• Star thistle honeyExtra light amber · ModerateLight and clean with a distinct anise-and-cinnamon lift and a fruity sweetness underneath. Delicate but not blank.
• Mesquite honeyExtra white · MildMild and smooth with a faint smoky-molasses note that arrives after the sweetness rather than with it.
• Gallberry honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral warmth and a faint bitterness on the finish that the name hints at without quite delivering.
• Saw palmetto honeyLight amber · PronouncedSmoky and peppery with a warm resinous depth — an unusual and slightly savoury honey that divides opinion sharply.
• Tulip poplar honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, buttery and malty with a smoky caramel depth and much less bitterness than its colour suggests.
• Buckwheat honeyDark amber · IntenseMalt, molasses and wet straw, with a savoury, almost animal depth. The most polarising honey in general production.
• Fireweed honeyWater white · DelicateVery delicate, buttery and faintly tea-like, with a clean finish and almost no aftertaste. A honey that rewards attention and disappears if you are not paying any.
• Blueberry honeyExtra light amber · ModerateTangy and lightly fruity with a green, slightly astringent edge — recognisably related to the berry without tasting of jam.
• Cranberry honeyLight amber · ModerateTart and fruity with a genuine cranberry acidity — one of very few honeys where sourness is a real part of the profile.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Soybean honeyWater white · MildVery pale and very mild, with a clean light sweetness and almost nothing to distinguish it. Its virtue is neutrality.
• Milkweed honeyWater white · MildExceptionally perfumed for such a pale honey — a clean floral sweetness with an almost tropical lift. Regarded as a delicacy where it can be produced in quantity.
• Spanish needle honeyExtra light amber · MildLight, mildly fruity and clean. An easy, agreeable honey rather than a dramatic one, which is exactly what an all-year background source produces.
• Manzanita honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and faintly spicy, with a clean short finish. Interesting mostly for when it is made rather than for how it tastes.
• Sumac honeyAmber · PronouncedTart, dark and lightly resinous, with a sour-fruit edge unusual in an American honey and a definite tannic dryness.
• Safflower honeyExtra light amber · MildLight amber and mildly nutty, with a faint thistle bitterness at the finish. Unassertive and rather more interesting than most crop honeys.
• Carrot seed honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, savoury and faintly medicinal, with a green umbellifer note and a slightly bitter finish. A challenging honey and an interesting one.
• Prairie honeyWater white · MildClean, mild and creamy, with a light floral sweetness. The reference point for what a great many people think honey tastes like.

Plants behind these honeys

• 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.
• AlfalfaMedicago sativaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
• LimeTilia cordataExtraordinary nectar productivity concentrated into a very short window. Its urban prevalence makes it disproportionately important to city beekeeping.
• SourwoodOxydendrum arboreumA serious nectar source with very little pollen to offer, which is a useful illustration of why the two are rated separately: sourwood feeds foragers superbly and contributes almost nothing to brood rearing.
• Ogeechee tupeloNyssa ogecheExceptional nectar in a short window, in a habitat with little competing bloom at that moment. Its value is concentration in time and space rather than volume across a season.
• SageSalviaVery high nectar and only moderate pollen — sage feeds adult foragers superbly and contributes comparatively little to brood rearing, which is a common pattern in the mint family.
• Black sageSalvia melliferaAn outstanding nectar source in a good year, and the backbone of the chaparral forage sequence.
• Yellow starthistleCentaurea solstitialisAn outstanding summer nectar source in a season when Californian forage is otherwise very thin.
• MesquiteProsopisA principal desert forage plant, providing both nectar and pollen in landscapes with very few alternatives.
• GallberryIlex glabraAn excellent late-spring nectar source across the southeastern coastal plain.

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.
• Mining beesAndrenaSolitary ground-nesting bees, and the small volcano-shaped mounds of fine soil that appear on lawns and bare paths in April are theirs. Mining bees are the classic spring solitary bees of the northern hemisphere: short-lived, entirely harmless, often nesting in dense aggregations that look like a colony but are not, and a great many of them are specialists that visit only one kind of flower.
• 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.
• Common eastern bumblebeeBombus impatiensNorth America's commercially reared bumblebee, produced by the million for glasshouse tomato and berry pollination, and the continent's counterpart to Europe's buff-tailed bumblebee in both usefulness and controversy. It is abundant, adaptable and thriving while several of its relatives collapse — and its commercial rearing is implicated in some of those collapses.
• Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
• Mason beesOsmiaSolitary spring bees that build their nests out of mud, and the best orchard pollinators most gardeners have never noticed. A female mason bee works entirely alone: she finds a hollow tube, provisions a cell with pollen, lays an egg, walls it off with mud, and repeats until the tube is full. She will pollinate an apple tree several times more effectively than a honey bee while doing it, and she is almost incapable of stinging anyone.

Honey in North America

Honey bees are introduced, arriving with European colonists in the seventeenth century. The movable-frame hive was developed here in 1851, and essentially all modern beekeeping practice follows from it. Indigenous North America had no honey bees and no honey tradition of this kind.

Deciding between two of them

• Clover vs alfalfa honey — The two great mild legume honeys of North America and northern Europe. They are genuinely similar, and the differences are small enough to be worth stating precisely.
• Sourwood vs tupelo honey — The two most prized honeys of the American south. Tupelo is famous for never setting; sourwood is famous for its aroma, and both are scarce for reasons of geography.