Northland honey

How honey is produced here

Northland's regenerating scrub is dominated by manuka, which colonises cleared land readily — the honey that transformed New Zealand beekeeping comes largely from land that was once forest and then farm. Colony density during the manuka flow has become a genuine management problem.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 4
• Buttery · 3
• Floral · 3
• Mineral and saline · 2

Honeys from Northland

• 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.
• Towai honeyWater white · MildVery pale and delicate with a faint butterscotch sweetness — noticeably lighter and milder than kamahi from the same genus.
• 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.
• 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.
• Tawari honeyExtra white · DelicateVery delicate, with a distinctive butterscotch note over a clean light sweetness — mild without being characterless, which is a difficult combination.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

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 Northland

Manuka's value has made hive placement rights on Māori land a substantial commercial and legal matter, and the question of who owns the name and the benefit is actively contested.

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.