Oman honey

How honey is produced here

Traditional Omani beekeeping uses hollowed date-palm trunk hives stacked in walls, a method documented for centuries and still in use. The native Apis mellifera jemenitica is adapted to heat that would kill European stock.

Production and trade in numbers

FAOSTAT, extracted 2026-09-29. Values not received as official national figures are marked as estimated or imputed. A year with no figure is a dash, never a zero. Trade values are customs declarations — not producer prices and not profit. Open it in the country tool, or read how countries compare.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 2
• Fruity · 2

Honeys from Oman

• Sidr honeyAmber · IntenseRich, dark and layered — caramel and dried fruit first, then a faintly medicinal bitterness and a long savoury finish. Complex in a way few honeys are.
• Samar honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and resinous with a warm caramelised depth and a distinct dry-country character — more assertive than sidr and less floral.

When these honeys are typically harvested

Plants behind these honeys

• SidrZiziphus spina-christiIn much of its range sidr is not merely a good forage plant but effectively the only one at that time of year, which makes it structurally critical rather than simply valuable.

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.
• 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.

Honey in Oman

Log-hive beekeeping in the mountains, part of the Arabian tradition sustained by prices for regional honeys that few other traditional keeping systems can match. Wall hives built into house construction are recorded here as across parts of the peninsula.

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.

• Wall hivesHive system · Practised, decliningA cavity built into the wall of a house during construction, with a flight hole outside and an access panel indoors. Common across the Himalaya, parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and still occupied in older buildings.
• Southern Arabian log-hive beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceHollow-log and stone-cavity hives stacked in walls and moved between wadis to follow the sidr flowering, producing one of the most expensive honeys in world trade.
• Honey in Islamic traditionCultural use · Widespread living practiceA chapter of the Qur'an named for the bee, honey in the prophetic medical tradition, and the effect both have had on a modern trade in high-value regional honeys.