Southeastern United States honey

How honey is produced here

Tupelo honey is produced in a very small area of the Apalachicola river swamps and is genuinely constrained by geography rather than by branding. Sourwood from the southern Appalachians is the other prestige crop, and both command prices well above commodity honey.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 5
• Fruity · 3
• Spicy · 3
• Caramel · 3
• Woody · 3
• Smoky · 3
• Buttery · 2
• Waxy · 2

Honeys from Southeastern United States

• Tupelo honeyExtra white · MildButtery and clean with a pear-and-green-apple lift, and a long soft finish that never turns cloying.
• Sourwood honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedSpicy and aromatic — anise and clove over a caramel base, with a dry, almost tannic finish that stops it being merely sweet.
• Gallberry honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral warmth and a faint bitterness on the finish that the name hints at without quite delivering.
• Titi honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light floral sweetness and no strong distinguishing character — the honey itself is unremarkable, which is why nothing about it justifies the cost to the colony.
• Saw palmetto honeyLight amber · PronouncedSmoky and peppery with a warm resinous depth — an unusual and slightly savoury honey that divides opinion sharply.
• Cabbage palm honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, smoky and savoury with a mineral saltiness and only moderate sweetness — an unusual and polarising honey.
• Mountain laurel honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedReported as bitter and sharp with a burning sensation in the throat, though the toxin is not reliably detectable by taste — which is the single most important fact about it.
• Tulip poplar honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, buttery and malty with a smoky caramel depth and much less bitterness than its colour suggests.
• Sumac honeyAmber · PronouncedTart, dark and lightly resinous, with a sour-fruit edge unusual in an American honey and a definite tannic dryness.
• Persimmon honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and fruity with a dried-date depth and a warm caramel base — one of the more distinctive minor American varietals and genuinely reminiscent of the ripe fruit.
• Chinese tallow honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint waxy note — an unremarkable flavour attached to a very remarkable ecological situation.

Plants behind these honeys

• Ogeechee tupeloNyssa ogecheExceptional nectar in a short window, in a habitat with little competing bloom at that moment. Its value is concentration in time and space rather than volume across a season.
• SourwoodOxydendrum arboreumA serious nectar source with very little pollen to offer, which is a useful illustration of why the two are rated separately: sourwood feeds foragers superbly and contributes almost nothing to brood rearing.
• GallberryIlex glabraAn excellent late-spring nectar source across the southeastern coastal plain.
• Saw palmettoSerenoa repensA heavy spring nectar and pollen source across a very large area.
• Cabbage palmSabal palmettoA good summer nectar and pollen source, and a useful bridge across the southeastern dearth.
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• Bell heatherErica cinereaA good nectar source and moderate for pollen, over a long summer season on ground with few alternatives.
• Tulip treeLiriodendron tulipiferaA heavy nectar source and a moderate pollen source, concentrated in a narrow late-spring window.
• SumacRhus speciesAn underrated source, notable because it grows in exactly the marginal roadside and old-field ground that supports little else.
• American persimmonDiospyros virginianaA good nectar source where the trees are numerous.

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.
• 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.
• Sweat beesHalictidaeThe bees that land on your arm in hot weather, and the group that breaks the tidy division between solitary and social bees more thoroughly than anything else in the order. Some sweat bees are strictly solitary, some form small colonies with a queen and workers, and a number switch between the two depending on latitude, altitude and season — the same species living socially in a warm valley and solitarily on the hill above it. They are also small, abundant, easily overlooked, and among the most important wild pollinators in temperate and tropical agriculture alike.
• 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.
• Metallic green sweat beeAgapostemonBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.

Deciding between two of them

• Sourwood vs tupelo honey — The two most prized honeys of the American south. Tupelo is famous for never setting; sourwood is famous for its aroma, and both are scarce for reasons of geography.