Senegal honey

How honey is produced here

Traditional harvesting by burning out wild colonies is still widespread and is the main quality problem — smoke-tainted honey and destroyed colonies both follow from it. Improved hive programmes address both at once.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 4
• Woody · 2
• Nutty · 2

Honeys from Senegal

• African acacia honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and spiced with a caramel base and a dry, faintly smoky finish — considerably more assertive than European acacia honey, which it is named after and resembles in no way.
• Baobab honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and mildly tangy with a distinct citrus-sherbet lift over caramel — brighter and more acidic than most African honeys and genuinely reminiscent of the tree's fruit.
• Babul honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm, nutty and full-bodied with a faint tannic dryness. A robust everyday honey rather than a delicate one.
• Shea honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and buttery with a nutty depth and a light caramel base — a rounded, approachable honey with a distinct richness.

Plants behind these honeys

• BaobabAdansonia digitataA good nectar and pollen source for the brief period the flowers are open.
• BabulVachellia niloticaOne of the major honey crops of northwestern India and Pakistan, and a substantial source across the Sahel.
• SheaVitellaria paradoxaA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the West African savannah.

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.
• African honey beeApis mellifera scutellataThe tropically adapted African honey bee that, crossed with European stock in Brazil in 1957, produced the Africanized populations of the Americas. In its own range it is simply the honey bee of eastern and southern Africa — productive, mobile, defensive, and superbly adapted to heat, drought and a formidable list of predators including honey badgers, ants and hive beetles.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in Senegal

Gourd and basket hives are among the commonest forms in the West African traditions documented here — whatever holds a cavity, sited and worked with the local bee rather than against it.

Traditions documented here

How honey is, or was, obtained in this place. Each record names the communities it is documented among, the period the record describes, and whether anyone is known to be doing it now.

• Gourd, basket and improvised hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceWhatever holds a cavity. Gourds, coiled baskets sealed with dung, upturned pots, oil drums and packing cases are the commonest hives in several countries and almost never appear in accounts of traditional beekeeping.