Pakistan honey

How honey is produced here

Apis mellifera was introduced in the late twentieth century and now dominates commercial production alongside native Apis cerana and wild Apis dorsata. Sidr honey from the Ziziphus of the Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa hills commands prices comparable to Yemeni.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 4
• Fruity · 3
• Vegetal · 3
• Floral · 3
• Spicy · 2
• Phenolic and medicinal · 2

Honeys from Pakistan

• 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.
• Babul honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm, nutty and full-bodied with a faint tannic dryness. A robust everyday honey rather than a delicate one.
• Mustard honeyExtra white · MildVery sweet and very mild with a faint pungent brassica note when fresh, fading to clean blandness as it ages and sets.
• Ber honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and rich with dried dates and caramel, and a faint herbal bitterness on the finish — recognisably a Ziziphus honey, and lighter than Yemeni sidr.
• Cotton honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
• Berseem honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint hay note — the archetype of an unassuming everyday honey.
• Neem honeyAmber · IntenseDistinctly bitter with a herbal, faintly medicinal character over a restrained sweetness — one of the least conventionally pleasant honeys in the catalogue, and deliberately so.
• Mango blossom honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and fruity with a distinct tropical-stone-fruit note and a faint resinous edge — one of the honeys that does taste recognisably of its tree's fruit, though more faintly than people expect.

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.
• BabulVachellia niloticaOne of the major honey crops of northwestern India and Pakistan, and a substantial source across the Sahel.
• JujubeZiziphus jujubaA very high nectar source in arid and semi-arid country where the alternatives are few, which makes it structurally important as well as productive.
• CottonGossypium hirsutumA prolonged nectar source from two distinct kinds of gland, plus abundant pollen.
• Red cloverTrifolium pratenseTop-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
• 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.
• NeemAzadirachta indicaA good dry-season nectar source across the Indian subcontinent.
• MangoMangifera indicaA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the tropics.

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.
• Asian honey beeApis ceranaThe western honey bee's counterpart across Asia, and a bee whose importance is out of all proportion to its honey yield. Apis cerana is the original host of Varroa destructor — the mite that has reshaped beekeeping worldwide — and it lives with the parasite without collapse. Understanding how is one of the more consequential open questions in apiculture.
• Giant honey beeApis dorsataThe largest honey bee in the world, and the one that cannot be kept. Apis dorsata builds a single enormous open comb hanging from a branch or a cliff overhang, defends it ferociously, migrates hundreds of kilometres seasonally, and has defeated every serious attempt to hive it. It produces a great deal of honey and all of it has to be hunted rather than farmed — which is why the honey it makes comes with rope ladders and night climbs attached.
• Dwarf honey beeApis floreaThe smallest honey bee, and the one that does its waggle dance the right way up. Apis florea builds a single small comb wrapped around a twig in a bush, and because the top of that comb forms a horizontal platform, the dancing bee points directly at the food source rather than translating the direction into an angle against gravity. It is the simplest form of the dance language and probably the ancestral one.
• 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.
• Egyptian honey beeApis mellifera lamarckiiThe honey bee of the Nile valley, and the subspecies depicted in the oldest images of beekeeping anywhere — the Fifth Dynasty reliefs at Abu Ghurab from around 2400 BCE show this bee being smoked, extracted and jarred. It is small, yellow, nervous and superbly adapted to desert heat, and it has been progressively displaced within Egypt by imported Italian stock.
• Italian honey beeApis mellifera ligusticaThe most widely kept honey bee subspecies in the world, and the golden-banded bee most people picture when they think of one. Italian bees were exported from the Ligurian valleys from the mid nineteenth century and now underpin commercial beekeeping across the Americas, Australasia and much of Europe — chosen for gentleness, prolific brood rearing and a strong disinclination to swarm.
• Stingless beesMeliponiniThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.

Deciding between two of them

• Sidr vs ber honey — Two honeys from closely related jujube trees, with a price gap of many times and no laboratory test that separates them. This is the most consequential substitution in the premium honey trade.