Slovenia honey

How honey is produced here

Forest honeydew — fir, spruce and oak — makes up a large share of Slovenian production, alongside chestnut, linden and acacia. The AŽ hive, a rear-opening stacked hive worked from inside a bee house, is a Slovenian design used almost nowhere else.

Flavour signature

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

• Mineral and saline · 5
• Resinous · 4
• Malty · 4
• Woody · 4
• Caramel · 3
• Molasses and treacle · 2
• Herbaceous · 2
• Floral · 2

Honeys from Slovenia

• Forest honeydew honeyDark amber · PronouncedResinous, malty and mineral, with far less sweetness than its darkness suggests. Closer to treacle and pine forest than to anything floral.
• Silver fir honeyDark amber · PronouncedMalty, resinous and barely sweet, with a balsamic depth and a long woody finish. One of the least sugary honeys there is.
• Spruce honeydew honeyAmber · PronouncedMalty and caramelised with a woody depth and restrained sweetness — warmer and less balsamic than fir honeydew.
• Chestnut honeyAmber · IntenseAromatic, woody and unmistakably bitter — sweetness first, tannin second, and a long dry finish.
• Alpine meadow honeyExtra light amber · ModerateComplex and aromatic, with a herbal lift over warm caramel and a distinctly clean finish — the flavour of a great many plants rather than of any one.
• Mountain honeyLight amber · PronouncedAromatic, complex and warm, with a herbal-resinous depth and considerably more going on than a lowland multifloral. It tastes of a landscape rather than of a flower.
• Metcalfa honeydew honeyAmber · ModerateModerately sweet with a distinct fig and dried-fruit character over a malty base — noticeably fruitier than the conifer honeydews and quite unlike them.

Plants behind these honeys

• Silver firAbies albaNo floral nectar and negligible pollen. Its entire forage value is honeydew, which is why nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue — a single bee-friendliness score would make this tree look worthless.
• Norway sprucePicea abiesNo floral nectar. Honeydew is the whole of its value, and it can be very substantial.
• 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.
• Scots pinePinus sylvestrisNo floral nectar, moderate wind-borne pollen that bees will collect, and honeydew in very large quantities where the scale insect is established.
• 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.
• Red cloverTrifolium pratenseTop-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
• ThymeThymus
• Bird's-foot trefoilLotus corniculatusGood for both, over a long season, from a plant that thrives on the poor unimproved ground most other forage will not tolerate.
• HarebellCampanula rotundifoliaA moderate nectar source and a critical pollen source — critical not in volume but in that specific bees can use nothing else.

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.
• Carniolan honey beeApis mellifera carnicaThe second most widely kept honey bee subspecies, and the one most European beekeepers choose over Italian stock. Carniolans come from the eastern Alps and the Balkans, and they are adapted to a short intense season: explosive spring build-up, rapid contraction in a dearth, frugal winter consumption — and a swarming instinct that gives beekeepers more work than any other trait.
• European dark beeApis mellifera melliferaThe honey bee that was native to northern Europe before anyone imported anything, and one that has been hybridised close to extinction across most of its range. The dark bee is slow to build, frugal, long-lived, and adapted to cold wet summers and long winters — traits that made it unfashionable when Italian stock arrived, and that look considerably more valuable now than they did in 1900.
• 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.

Honey in Slovenia

Slovenia proposed World Bee Day, adopted by the United Nations for 20 May — the birthday of Anton Janša, the eighteenth-century Slovenian beekeeper appointed as the first royal teacher of apiculture in Vienna. Painted beehive panels are a recognised folk art form in their own right.

Deciding between two of them

• Single-source vs mixed forest honeydew — Honeydew honey is sold both as a named species crop and as a general forest honey. The distinction is genuine and it affects both character and price.