South Australia honey

How honey is produced here

Mallee eucalypts of the Murray basin and yellow gum from the ranges are the principal flows, with yellow gum's autumn and winter flowering unusually valuable in a landscape that otherwise shuts down.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 6
• Resinous · 5
• Floral · 4
• Malty · 3
• Woody · 2

Honeys from South Australia

• Mallee honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light caramel sweetness and a faint eucalypt lift — approachable and consistent.
• Yellow gum honeyExtra light amber · MildClean and mildly aromatic with a soft finish — the gentlest of the commercial eucalypt honeys and a good introduction to the group.
• River red gum honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong and warmly medicinal — the classic eucalypt register, with caramel underneath and a menthol lift at the end.
• Grey box honeyExtra light amber · ModerateClean and lightly caramelised with a faint buttery quality — mild for a eucalypt honey and highly regarded for its density and smoothness.
• Stringybark honeyLight amber · ModerateFull and malty with a clean eucalypt aromatic edge and a slightly dry finish. A robust everyday honey by Australian standards.
• Messmate honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and resinous with a malty depth and a faintly medicinal eucalypt lift — assertive and unmistakably Australian.
• Prickly box honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint honeyed-almond note — pleasant and considerably gentler than leatherwood.
• Banksia honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong, malty and savoury with a burnt-caramel depth and a distinctly salty-mineral edge.
• Salvation Jane honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness — pleasant, unassertive and produced in enormous quantity.

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.
• Yellow gumEucalyptus leucoxylonAmong the most valuable winter forage trees in southern Australia, and widely planted in shelterbelts and street plantings for that reason.
• StringybarkEucalyptus macrorhyncha and related speciesOne of the mainstays of Australian commercial honey production, valued for both a heavy nectar flow and good pollen.
• Prickly boxBursaria spinosaAn excellent summer nectar and pollen source, and among the most heavily visited plants in southeastern Australia.
• BanksiaBanksiaTop nectar production in the catalogue for sheer volume per flower head, delivered in the Australian cool season when little else is open.
• Viper's buglossEchium vulgareAmong the most productive nectar plants in the European flora per flower, and a good pollen source alongside it. In New Zealand, naturalised echium is a significant commercial honey source under the name blue borage.

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.
• Australian stingless beeTetragonula carbonariaAustralia's social native bee, kept in boxes by a growing number of hobbyists and used commercially to pollinate macadamia. It builds a brood comb in a rising spiral — a genuinely beautiful structure unlike anything else in the bee world — stores honey in separate resin pots, and produces a tart, medicinal honey that Aboriginal Australians have harvested as sugarbag for many thousands of years.
• Blue-banded beeAmegillaFast, stocky solitary bees marked with brilliant iridescent blue or white bands, and among the most effective buzz pollinators anywhere. They grip a flower and vibrate their flight muscles at a frequency that shakes pollen out of tubular anthers — the technique tomatoes require and honey bees cannot perform — which has made them the subject of serious commercial pollination research in Australia.
• Leafcutter beesMegachileThe bees responsible for the neat semicircular notches cut from rose and lilac leaves every summer. A female leafcutter bee cuts oval pieces of leaf with her mandibles, carries each one back curled beneath her body, and uses them to line and seal a nest cell — the cells end up looking like small green cigars. The damage to the plant is cosmetic and the bee is one of the most efficient pollinators in agriculture.
• 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.
• 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 South Australia

Kangaroo Island was declared a bee sanctuary in 1885 and importing bees or used equipment has been prohibited since. The Ligurian population there is claimed as the last genetically pure one anywhere, though that claim is contested.