South Africa honey

How honey is produced here

Eucalyptus plantations supply the bulk of the crop, with fynbos honey from the Cape as the distinctive regional product. Deciduous fruit and canola pollination in the Western Cape is worth more to most commercial beekeepers than the honey is.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 6
• Herbaceous · 3
• Phenolic and medicinal · 3
• Resinous · 2
• Floral · 2
• Woody · 2
• Nutty · 2
• Malty · 2

Honeys from South Africa

• Fynbos honeyLight amber · PronouncedComplex and aromatic — herbal, faintly resinous and warmly caramelised, with a character that changes noticeably between producers.
• Eucalyptus honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWoody and faintly medicinal, with caramel and a cool eucalypt lift. More savoury than its colour suggests.
• Blue gum honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrongly medicinal and camphoraceous with a caramel base — the flavour most people mean when they say a honey tastes of eucalyptus.
• Sweet thorn honeyExtra light amber · MildSoft, floral and clean, with a faint almond note carried over from the flower's own scent. An easy honey and a very well-made one at its best.
• Aloe honeyAmber · PronouncedDistinctly bitter with a warm caramel base and a faintly medicinal herbal note — the bitterness is pronounced and is the reason people buy it.
• 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.
• Mopane honeyAmber · PronouncedDark and malty with a savoury mineral depth and a faintly smoky finish — closer to a European forest honeydew than to an African blossom honey.

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.
• Sweet thornVachellia karrooA major southern African honey crop and, in many districts, the single most important source there is.
• Bitter aloeAloe feroxAn excellent winter nectar and pollen source in a landscape with few alternatives at that season.
• MacadamiaMacadamia integrifoliaA good nectar and pollen source over a defined spring window.
• MopaneColophospermum mopaneModest floral nectar and a substantial honeydew resource, which is the reason the woodland supports beekeeping at all.

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.
• Cape honey beeApis mellifera capensisA honey bee subspecies with a piece of biology that should not work and does. Cape worker bees can lay diploid female eggs without mating — thelytokous parthenogenesis, effectively cloning themselves — which means a worker can become a reproductive without ever becoming a queen. Introduced into the range of neighbouring African bees, that capacity turns into a social parasite that destroys colonies wholesale, and the resulting capensis problem has cost South African beekeeping enormously.
• Carpenter beesXylocopaThe largest bees most people ever see, and among the loudest. Carpenter bees excavate their own tunnels in dead wood using their mandibles — a remarkable feat for an insect — and the biggest species are the size of the top joint of a thumb. The violet carpenter bee, glossy black with iridescent blue-violet wings, is one of the most spectacular insects in Europe and is spreading northwards.
• 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.

Honey in South Africa

The Cape honey bee, Apis mellifera capensis, has a reproductive quirk found in no other honey bee: workers can lay diploid female eggs without mating, which lets them parasitise other colonies. Moving Cape bees north caused a collapse in Highveld colonies that took years to bring under control.