Serbia honey

How honey is produced here

Acacia from the Vojvodina plain is the commercial mainstay, with oak honeydew from the hill forests and a substantial linden flow. Serbia's plum acreage — the largest in Europe — exists for slivovitz, and the honey is incidental to it.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 3

Honeys from Serbia

• 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.
• Oak honeydew honeyDark amber · IntenseEarthy, salty and barely sweet, with a bitter-mineral depth and a finish more like a stock or a yeast extract than a sweetener.
• Plum blossom honeyExtra white · MildLight, sweet and gently almondy, with a soft fruit note behind it. An easy honey and a short-lived one.
• Linden honeyExtra white · ModerateFresh and cooling — mint, balsam and lime blossom, with a clean herbal sharpness no other pale honey has.

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.
• English oakQuercus roburNo floral nectar and little useful pollen — the catkins are wind-pollinated and their pollen is collected only incidentally. The honeydew is the entire beekeeping interest, and stating that plainly is more useful than calling the tree bee-friendly.
• PlumPrunus domesticaA useful early nectar source and a generous pollen source when colonies most need pollen for brood rearing.
• LimeTilia cordataExtraordinary nectar productivity concentrated into a very short window. Its urban prevalence makes it disproportionately important to city beekeeping.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.