Norway honey

How honey is produced here

Norwegian beekeeping is constrained by winter more than by summer — colonies must be wintered through a long cold dark and are frequently fed heavily. Heather honey from the coastal and upland moors is the prestige crop, and much of it is creamed.

Flavour signature

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

• Fruity · 3
• Caramel · 3
• Woody · 3
• Floral · 2
• Mineral and saline · 2

Honeys from Norway

• Bilberry honeyAmber · PronouncedTangy and berry-forward over a caramel base, with a green astringency and a genuine fruit acidity.
• Lingonberry honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and clean with a distinct tart berry note and a fresh acidity — one of the few honeys that genuinely tastes of the fruit its plant produces.
• Heather honeyAmber · IntenseStrong, smoky and slightly bitter, with a lingering woodfire-and-toffee character. One of the most complex honeys produced anywhere.
• Spruce honeydew honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and caramelised with a woody depth and restrained sweetness — warmer and less balsamic than fir honeydew.
• Raspberry honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and lightly fruity with a clean bright acidity — one of the few honeys where a taster unprompted names the right fruit.

Plants behind these honeys

• BilberryVaccinium myrtillusGood nectar at a critical early moment for northern colonies and for emerging bumblebee queens, whose founding success tracks bilberry abundance closely in Fennoscandia.
• BlueberryVaccinium corymbosumUseful early forage, and a textbook illustration that abundant flowers do not guarantee an efficient pollination relationship.
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• Norway sprucePicea abiesNo floral nectar. Honeydew is the whole of its value, and it can be very substantial.
• RaspberryRubus idaeusOne of the highest-yielding nectar plants in temperate horticulture, and good for pollen too. Very few plants combine this productivity with this reliability.

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.
• 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.
• European dark beeApis mellifera melliferaThe honey bee that was native to northern Europe before anyone imported anything, and one that has been hybridised close to extinction across most of its range. The dark bee is slow to build, frugal, long-lived, and adapted to cold wet summers and long winters — traits that made it unfashionable when Italian stock arrived, and that look considerably more valuable now than they did in 1900.
• 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.