Romania honey

How honey is produced here

Colonies are moved through a sequence of flows — acacia in the Danube plain in May, then linden, sunflower and mountain meadow — in one of the more organised migratory systems in Europe. Much of the crop leaves in bulk for blending elsewhere, which is why Romanian honey is widely eaten and rarely named.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 4
• Buttery · 2
• Herbaceous · 2
• Vegetal · 2
• Waxy · 2
• Caramel · 2

Honeys from Romania

• Acacia honeyWater white · DelicateClean, light and sweet with almost nothing in the way. The honey to reach for when you want sweetness without a flavour opinion.
• Linden honeyExtra white · ModerateFresh and cooling — mint, balsam and lime blossom, with a clean herbal sharpness no other pale honey has.
• Sunflower honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStraw, beeswax and pollen, with a slightly waxy mouthfeel and a fresh, faintly herbal edge.
• Meadow honeyExtra light amber · ModerateSoft, warm and floral with a hay-and-clover base — recognisably a summer field, and gentler and less resinous than mountain honey.
• Spruce honeydew honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and caramelised with a woody depth and restrained sweetness — warmer and less balsamic than fir honeydew.
• Plum blossom honeyExtra white · MildLight, sweet and gently almondy, with a soft fruit note behind it. An easy honey and a short-lived one.
• Rapeseed honeyWater white · MildVery sweet, very mild, faintly cabbage-like when fresh and cleanly bland once set. Texture is what it has instead of flavour.

Plants behind these honeys

• Black locustRobinia pseudoacaciaAn exceptional nectar source for a very short period. Pollen is useful but secondary — this is a nectar tree above all.
• LimeTilia cordataExtraordinary nectar productivity concentrated into a very short window. Its urban prevalence makes it disproportionately important to city beekeeping.
• SunflowerHelianthus annuusAn outstanding late-summer pollen source at a point in the season when pollen is becoming scarce, which matters for colonies raising the bees that will overwinter.
• Wildflower meadowMixed native floraThe highest combined forage value of anything in this catalogue, because of diversity and duration rather than any single plant's output.
• 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.
• DandelionTaraxacum officinaleThe pollen is what makes it critical. It arrives when colonies are expanding fastest and have the least in reserve, and bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation depend on early sources like this one to found a nest at all.
• Norway sprucePicea abiesNo floral nectar. Honeydew is the whole of its value, and it can be very substantial.
• PlumPrunus domesticaA useful early nectar source and a generous pollen source when colonies most need pollen for brood rearing.
• Oilseed rapeBrassica napusTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, and delivered at exactly the moment colonies are expanding fastest in spring. Its faults are entirely about what comes after.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Red mason beeOsmia bicornisThe bee in your bee hotel. Osmia bicornis is the commonest cavity-nesting solitary bee in northwest Europe, the one most gardeners actually manage to attract, and one of the most effective fruit pollinators known — a few hundred females will pollinate an orchard acre as thoroughly as a honey bee colony of tens of thousands. It is also, for practical purposes, incapable of stinging anyone.

Deciding between two of them

• Acacia vs linden honey — Both are pale central European tree honeys with short intense flows. One tastes of almost nothing and the other is among the most aromatic honeys there is.
• Sunflower vs rapeseed honey — The two great field-crop honeys of Europe. Both set fast and both are cheap, and one has considerably more to say than the other.