Queensland honey

How honey is produced here

Yapunyah from the Channel Country and ironbark from the inland ranges are the prestige crops. Queensland is also the centre of Australian stingless beekeeping, where Tetragonula carbonaria is kept in boxes for honey and increasingly for crop pollination.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 11
• Resinous · 8
• Buttery · 4
• Malty · 3
• Woody · 3
• Citrus · 2
• Phenolic and medicinal · 2

Honeys from Queensland

• Ironbark honeyExtra light amber · ModerateRich, buttery and dense with a warm caramel depth and a clean eucalypt lift at the end.
• Yapunyah honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and buttery with a light caramel sweetness and a clean finish — smooth in a way that people notice before they notice the flavour.
• Bloodwood honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and malty with a resinous depth and a distinct woody astringency — one of the more assertive Australian honeys.
• Spotted gum honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramelised with a light resinous lift and a rounded finish — a middle-weight eucalypt honey and a very usable one.
• Blackbutt honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramelised with a light resinous edge — one of the milder eucalypt honeys and a good introduction to the group.
• Brush box honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint resinous edge — approachable and undemanding.
• White box honeyExtra light amber · MildClean and lightly caramelised with a faint buttery smoothness — mild, dense and highly regarded within Australia.
• Macadamia honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and nutty with a roasted depth and a butterscotch base — one of the few honeys that genuinely tastes like the crop it came from.
• Sugarbag honeyLight amber · PronouncedSharply tangy and fruity with a resinous edge — often described as lemon-and-caramel, and quite unlike honey bee honey in every respect.
• Paperbark honeyLight amber · PronouncedMedicinal and camphorous over an amber sweetness — a strong, distinctly antiseptic character that some people find difficult.
• Swamp mahogany honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong, malty and resinous with a lingering bitterness. One of the more challenging Australian honeys and a good one.
• Coolibah honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light caramel note and a soft buttery finish — undemanding and pleasant.
• Wilga honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and faintly spicy with a clean finish, and without the camphor edge that runs through the eucalypt honeys of the same landscape.

Plants behind these honeys

• 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.
• MacadamiaMacadamia integrifoliaA good nectar and pollen source over a defined spring window.
• PaperbarkMelaleuca speciesA reliable coastal and wetland flow across eastern Australia, and valuable partly because it occupies ground the drier eucalypts do not.
• Swamp mahoganyEucalyptus robustaA keystone winter nectar source for the whole east coast fauna, and a substantial commercial honey flow alongside that.
• WilgaGeijera parvifloraA dependable inland source when the rains have come, and one of the few trees that gives the western New South Wales apiaries anything at all in winter.

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.
• Australian stingless beeTetragonula carbonariaAustralia's social native bee, kept in boxes by a growing number of hobbyists and used commercially to pollinate macadamia. It builds a brood comb in a rising spiral — a genuinely beautiful structure unlike anything else in the bee world — stores honey in separate resin pots, and produces a tart, medicinal honey that Aboriginal Australians have harvested as sugarbag for many thousands of years.
• Blue-banded beeAmegillaFast, stocky solitary bees marked with brilliant iridescent blue or white bands, and among the most effective buzz pollinators anywhere. They grip a flower and vibrate their flight muscles at a frequency that shakes pollen out of tubular anthers — the technique tomatoes require and honey bees cannot perform — which has made them the subject of serious commercial pollination research in Australia.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in Queensland

Sugarbag — honey from native stingless bees — has a long Aboriginal harvesting tradition across northern Australia, and the wax and honey were both used. It is a genuinely different product from Apis honey and is priced accordingly.