Portugal honey

How honey is produced here

Portugal holds a large number of protected designations for honey relative to its production volume, covering the Barroso, Alentejo, Ribatejo and several other regions. Eucalyptus plantations established for pulpwood have become a major and somewhat uncomfortable part of the honey landscape.

Flavour signature

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

• Woody · 7
• Phenolic and medicinal · 6
• Caramel · 5
• Resinous · 4
• Mineral and saline · 4
• Herbaceous · 3
• Smoky · 3
• Vegetal · 3

Honeys from Portugal

• Rosmaninho honeyLight amber · ModerateAromatic and resinous with a warm herbal sweetness and a faint eucalyptus lift — more robust and less perfumed than Provençal lavender honey.
• Eucalyptus honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWoody and faintly medicinal, with caramel and a cool eucalypt lift. More savoury than its colour suggests.
• Blue gum honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrongly medicinal and camphoraceous with a caramel base — the flavour most people mean when they say a honey tastes of eucalyptus.
• Rockrose honeyLight amber · PronouncedBalsamic and resinous with a warm amber sweetness underneath — it smells of incense and hot scrubland, and tastes considerably less sweet than its colour suggests.
• Strawberry tree honeyAmber · IntenseAggressively bitter — coffee grounds, artichoke and burnt sugar, with the sweetness arriving late and briefly. Nothing in food prepares most people for it.
• Chestnut honeyAmber · IntenseAromatic, woody and unmistakably bitter — sweetness first, tannin second, and a long dry finish.
• Tree heath honeyAmber · IntenseStrong, malty and slightly bitter, with a burnt-caramel depth and a woody finish — assertive in a way that divides opinion sharply.
• Carob honeyAmber · IntenseDark, malty and distinctly savoury with a fermented, almost cheesy note that people either find fascinating or cannot get past.
• Almond blossom honeyLight amber · PronouncedDistinctly bitter with a marzipan aroma over it — one of the few honeys where bitterness arrives before sweetness, and an acquired taste even among people who like bitter honeys.
• Ivy honeyExtra white · PronouncedStrong, faintly bitter and distinctly herbal — closer to a dark honey in character than its pale colour suggests.
• Holm oak honeydew honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, savoury and barely sweet, with malt, liquorice and a genuine salt-mineral depth. As far from what people expect honey to be as anything in the catalogue.
• Cardoon honeyLight amber · PronouncedSavoury and faintly bitter, with a warm caramel body and an unmistakable green-vegetable note that is genuinely artichoke-like.

Plants behind these honeys

• RockroseCistus ladaniferAn outstanding pollen source and a good nectar one, and a plant that also supplies resin for propolis — an unusual triple contribution.
• EucalyptusEucalyptusProlific in both nectar and pollen when flowering, though the pollen of some species is nutritionally poor for honey bees, and colonies confined to a single eucalypt species can suffer over time despite abundant forage.
• LavenderLavandula angustifoliaAn unusually good nectar plant relative to its pollen offering. Bees visiting lavender are mostly there for nectar, which is why it supports adult foragers well and contributes less to brood rearing.
• Strawberry treeArbutus unedoValuable out of all proportion to its abundance, because of when it flowers. Late nectar lets colonies enter winter with fresh stores in a landscape that has otherwise shut down.
• Sweet chestnutCastanea sativaAn exceptional pollen source — the catkins shed enormous quantities — and a good nectar source in the right weather. The pollen arrives at a useful moment for colonies building towards late summer.
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• Bell heatherErica cinereaA good nectar source and moderate for pollen, over a long summer season on ground with few alternatives.
• CarobCeratonia siliquaStructurally important rather than abundant — a good nectar source at a time of year when a Mediterranean colony has almost no alternatives.
• AlmondPrunus dulcisTop-rated for both, at the single most valuable moment of the year for a colony coming out of winter. That is precisely why the pollination market exists.
• IvyHedera helixOne of the very few plants that is top-rated for both nectar and pollen, and it delivers them when the year's other options have finished. For overwintering insects this is decisive.

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.
• Iberian honey beeApis mellifera iberiensisThe honey bee of Spain and Portugal, and one of the more genetically interesting subspecies in Europe — it carries ancestry from both the western European dark bee lineage and the African lineage across the Strait of Gibraltar, in a gradient running from north to south. It is defensive, frugal, prone to swarming, and superbly adapted to a landscape of long dry summers.
• 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.
• Blue orchard beeOsmia lignariaNorth America's managed mason bee, and the species increasingly deployed alongside honey bees in Californian almond orchards because it does something honey bees cannot: fly in the cold wet weather that February almond bloom routinely brings. A few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as effectively as a full honey bee colony, and they are sold as cocoons in a box.
• 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.
• Carpenter beesXylocopaThe largest bees most people ever see, and among the loudest. Carpenter bees excavate their own tunnels in dead wood using their mandibles — a remarkable feat for an insect — and the biggest species are the size of the top joint of a thumb. The violet carpenter bee, glossy black with iridescent blue-violet wings, is one of the most spectacular insects in Europe and is spreading northwards.

Honey in Portugal

Rosmaninho — Lavandula stoechas, the Portuguese lavender — gives a honey that is a regional staple and quite distinct from French lavender honey, and it is the clearest case of a Portuguese monofloral that does not travel under its own name.

Deciding between two of them

• Chestnut vs strawberry tree honey — The two great bitter honeys of Europe. One is widely available and a good introduction; the other is the most bitter honey in production and divides people completely.