Spain honey

How honey is produced here

Transhumant beekeeping is long established: colonies move between altitudes and regions to follow successive flows from the early rosemary of Andalusia to late mountain heather.

Flavour signature

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

• Resinous · 4
• Fruity · 4
• Woody · 4
• Floral · 3
• Herbaceous · 3
• Caramel · 3
• Phenolic and medicinal · 3
• Citrus · 2

Honeys from Spain

• Rosemary honeyWater white · DelicateDelicate and softly aromatic — floral first, with a thin thread of resin behind it that tells you where it came from.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Thyme honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm, herbal and savoury — thyme and dry stone, with a peppery lift and a very long finish.
• Eucalyptus honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWoody and faintly medicinal, with caramel and a cool eucalypt lift. More savoury than its colour suggests.
• Lemon blossom honeyWater white · ModerateBright, sharply citrus and clean — lemon zest and blossom rather than the softer neroli of orange blossom, with a genuine acidity behind it.
• Rockrose honeyLight amber · PronouncedBalsamic and resinous with a warm amber sweetness underneath — it smells of incense and hot scrubland, and tastes considerably less sweet 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.
• Cardoon honeyLight amber · PronouncedSavoury and faintly bitter, with a warm caramel body and an unmistakable green-vegetable note that is genuinely artichoke-like.
• Holm oak honeydew honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, savoury and barely sweet, with malt, liquorice and a genuine salt-mineral depth. As far from what people expect honey to be as anything in the catalogue.

Plants behind these honeys

• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• 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.
• RosemarySalvia rosmarinusThe timing is what makes it exceptional rather than the volume. A high-value plant in March is worth far more to bees than a better plant in July, when everything is flowering.
• Sweet orangeCitrus sinensisA heavy nectar source over a substantial period, and moderate for pollen.
• ThymeThymus
• RockroseCistus ladaniferAn outstanding pollen source and a good nectar one, and a plant that also supplies resin for propolis — an unusual triple contribution.
• Globe artichokeCynara cardunculusAn outstanding nectar and pollen source, and one of the single most productive flowers in a garden.
• ThistleGalactites tomentosaAmong the most productive nectar plants in Mediterranean grassland, and one of the few that supports butterflies and bees equally well.
• Holm oakQuercus ilexA pollen source in spring and, in the right years, a substantial honeydew source from midsummer onwards. The two have nothing to do with each other.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• Italian honey beeApis mellifera ligusticaThe most widely kept honey bee subspecies in the world, and the golden-banded bee most people picture when they think of one. Italian bees were exported from the Ligurian valleys from the mid nineteenth century and now underpin commercial beekeeping across the Americas, Australasia and much of Europe — chosen for gentleness, prolific brood rearing and a strong disinclination to swarm.
• 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.
• Iberian honey beeApis mellifera iberiensisThe honey bee of Spain and Portugal, and one of the more genetically interesting subspecies in Europe — it carries ancestry from both the western European dark bee lineage and the African lineage across the Strait of Gibraltar, in a gradient running from north to south. It is defensive, frugal, prone to swarming, and superbly adapted to a landscape of long dry summers.

Honey in Spain

The Cueva de la Araña rock shelter near Bicorp in Valencia carries the most reproduced image in the history of honey: a figure climbing towards a cliff cavity, reaching in, holding a container, with bees around them. It is a wild-nest harvest rather than beekeeping, and its date is a bracket several millennia wide rather than the single figure usually quoted.

Traditions documented here

How honey is, or was, obtained in this place. Each record names the communities it is documented among, the period the record describes, and whether anyone is known to be doing it now.

• Cork hivesHive system · Practised, decliningCylinders of cork bark, used across the western Mediterranean wherever cork oak is worked. Excellent insulation, effectively free where the forestry already exists, and a good illustration of hive design following local material.
• Moving hives to follow floweringBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceCarrying colonies to successive flowerings — up a mountain, down a river, across a region — long before lorries. The direct ancestor of industrial migratory pollination, and a practice with a documented history in the Mediterranean, the Nile valley and Arabia.

Deciding between two of them

• Thyme vs rosemary honey — The two great Mediterranean herb honeys. Thyme is warm, savoury and assertive; rosemary is pale, delicate and sets fast — and they are used for opposite purposes.
• Orange vs lemon blossom honey — Two citrus honeys from the same orchards, and the difference is sharper than the shared category suggests: one is perfumed and the other is bright.