Sudan honey

How honey is produced here

Talh and hashab acacia stands are tapped for gum and worked for honey by the same communities, often in the same season. Production is largely traditional and very little of it reaches an international market with documentation attached.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 6
• Woody · 3
• Floral · 3
• Nutty · 2

Honeys from Sudan

• Talh honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, thick and savoury-sweet, with dried fruit and molasses over a caramel depth. Nothing about it suggests the honey Europe calls acacia.
• African acacia honeyLight amber · PronouncedWarm and spiced with a caramel base and a dry, faintly smoky finish — considerably more assertive than European acacia honey, which it is named after and resembles in no way.
• Babul honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm, nutty and full-bodied with a faint tannic dryness. A robust everyday honey rather than a delicate one.
• Sesame honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a distinct toasted-nut note and a light caramel base — the nutty character is genuine rather than suggested by the name.
• Baobab honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and mildly tangy with a distinct citrus-sherbet lift over caramel — brighter and more acidic than most African honeys and genuinely reminiscent of the tree's fruit.
• Cotton honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
• Berseem honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint hay note — the archetype of an unassuming everyday honey.

Plants behind these honeys

• Talh acaciaVachellia seyalA major dry-season source across the Sahel and Arabia, and the backbone of migratory beekeeping in Sudan.
• BabulVachellia niloticaOne of the major honey crops of northwestern India and Pakistan, and a substantial source across the Sahel.
• SesameSesamum indicumA good nectar and pollen source, and unusual in offering nectar from two different kinds of gland.
• BaobabAdansonia digitataA good nectar and pollen source for the brief period the flowers are open.
• CottonGossypium hirsutumA prolonged nectar source from two distinct kinds of gland, plus abundant pollen.
• Red cloverTrifolium pratenseTop-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
• White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.

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.
• Egyptian honey beeApis mellifera lamarckiiThe honey bee of the Nile valley, and the subspecies depicted in the oldest images of beekeeping anywhere — the Fifth Dynasty reliefs at Abu Ghurab from around 2400 BCE show this bee being smoked, extracted and jarred. It is small, yellow, nervous and superbly adapted to desert heat, and it has been progressively displaced within Egypt by imported Italian stock.
• Dwarf honey beeApis floreaThe smallest honey bee, and the one that does its waggle dance the right way up. Apis florea builds a single small comb wrapped around a twig in a bush, and because the top of that comb forms a horizontal platform, the dancing bee points directly at the food source rather than translating the direction into an angle against gravity. It is the simplest form of the dance language and probably the ancestral one.
• Asian honey beeApis ceranaThe western honey bee's counterpart across Asia, and a bee whose importance is out of all proportion to its honey yield. Apis cerana is the original host of Varroa destructor — the mite that has reshaped beekeeping worldwide — and it lives with the parasite without collapse. Understanding how is one of the more consequential open questions in apiculture.
• Giant honey beeApis dorsataThe largest honey bee in the world, and the one that cannot be kept. Apis dorsata builds a single enormous open comb hanging from a branch or a cliff overhang, defends it ferociously, migrates hundreds of kilometres seasonally, and has defeated every serious attempt to hive it. It produces a great deal of honey and all of it has to be hunted rather than farmed — which is why the honey it makes comes with rope ladders and night climbs attached.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in Sudan

Hung cylindrical hives of bark, bamboo or woven material, sealed with dung and hoisted high into trees, belong to the tradition documented across this region and Ethiopia. Nile valley beekeeping to the north is among the oldest documented anywhere.

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.

• Hung cylinder hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceCylinders of bark, bamboo, basketry or hollowed wood, sealed with dung and hoisted high into trees away from the homestead. The dominant form in Ethiopia and across much of East Africa, and the reason harvesting there is a climb.
• Nile valley beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningStacked horizontal clay cylinders worked from the rear, moved along the river to follow flowering. Depicted from the third millennium BCE and still recognisable in twentieth-century Egyptian practice, which makes it one of the longest documented continuities in beekeeping.