Pacific Northwest honey

How honey is produced here

Meadowfoam is a genuine regional oddity — a seed crop grown almost nowhere else, giving a honey with a marshmallow and vanilla character quite unlike anything around it. Fireweed follows fire and clear-felling, which makes its supply a function of forestry and wildfire rather than of agriculture.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 6
• Caramel · 4
• Herbaceous · 3
• Fruity · 3
• Vegetal · 3
• Spicy · 3
• Buttery · 2

Honeys from Pacific Northwest

• 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.
• Meadowfoam honeyExtra white · ModerateToasted marshmallow and vanilla, unmistakably. The one honey most people identify blind on the first spoonful, because it tastes like something they already know.
• 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.
• Ceanothus honeyWater white · MildDelicate and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint spicy edge — mild, and rather more interesting than a pale honey usually is.
• Snowberry honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint green note — pleasant and unassertive.
• 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.
• Star thistle honeyExtra light amber · ModerateLight and clean with a distinct anise-and-cinnamon lift and a fruity sweetness underneath. Delicate but not blank.
• 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.
• Rabbitbrush honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and resinous with a bitter herbal edge and a distinctly medicinal note — one of the more challenging American honeys and an acquired taste at best.

Plants behind these honeys

• Rosebay willowherbChamaenerion angustifoliumA major nectar source at a point in the year when many landscapes have gone quiet, and the mainstay of high-summer beekeeping across boreal North America and Scandinavia.
• BlueberryVaccinium corymbosumUseful early forage, and a textbook illustration that abundant flowers do not guarantee an efficient pollination relationship.
• CranberryVaccinium macrocarponA moderate nectar and pollen source, and one that honey bees are notably reluctant to work when anything else is available.
• Black sageSalvia melliferaAn outstanding nectar source in a good year, and the backbone of the chaparral forage sequence.
• RockroseCistus ladaniferAn outstanding pollen source and a good nectar one, and a plant that also supplies resin for propolis — an unusual triple contribution.
• SnowberrySymphoricarpos albusA good nectar source with an exceptionally long season, which is its principal virtue.
• Wild carrotDaucus carotaModerate nectar and good pollen, in the most accessible form available — its value is the breadth of the visitor list rather than the volume.
• Yellow starthistleCentaurea solstitialisAn outstanding summer nectar source in a season when Californian forage is otherwise very thin.
• ManzanitaArctostaphylos speciesThe critical winter and early-spring source across Californian chaparral, feeding colonies through the build-up towards almond pollination.
• GoldenrodSolidagoTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, delivered at the moment they matter most. For North American beekeeping this is the most important single genus in the second half of the year.

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.
• 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.
• Metallic green sweat beeAgapostemonBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.
• 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.
• Western bumblebeeBombus occidentalisOnce among the commonest bumblebees of western North America and now scarce across much of that range, in a decline that began abruptly in the late 1990s. It was also reared commercially for glasshouse pollination until production collapsed from disease — which is the same period, and probably not a coincidence.
• 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.