Sweden honey

How honey is produced here

The Swedish season is compressed into a few weeks of very long daylight, which produces yields that surprise anyone reasoning from latitude alone. Berry-heath honeys from the boreal forest are the distinctive products; rapeseed and clover carry the volume.

Flavour signature

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

• Fruity · 3
• Caramel · 3
• Woody · 2

Honeys from Sweden

• Bilberry honeyAmber · PronouncedTangy and berry-forward over a caramel base, with a green astringency and a genuine fruit acidity.
• Lingonberry honeyExtra white · MildDelicate and clean with a distinct tart berry note and a fresh acidity — one of the few honeys that genuinely tastes of the fruit its plant produces.
• Rowan honeyLight amber · ModerateAmber, tart and faintly bitter, with a red-fruit note that echoes the berries the tree is better known for.
• Heather honeyAmber · IntenseStrong, smoky and slightly bitter, with a lingering woodfire-and-toffee character. One of the most complex honeys produced anywhere.
• Rapeseed honeyWater white · MildVery sweet, very mild, faintly cabbage-like when fresh and cleanly bland once set. Texture is what it has instead of flavour.

Plants behind these honeys

• BilberryVaccinium myrtillusGood nectar at a critical early moment for northern colonies and for emerging bumblebee queens, whose founding success tracks bilberry abundance closely in Fennoscandia.
• BlueberryVaccinium corymbosumUseful early forage, and a textbook illustration that abundant flowers do not guarantee an efficient pollination relationship.
• RowanSorbus aucupariaGood pollen and moderate nectar, delivered in a completely accessible form. Its wider wildlife value — berries for thrushes and winter migrants — is at least as significant.
• HeatherCalluna vulgaris
• Oilseed rapeBrassica napusTop-rated for both nectar and pollen, and delivered at exactly the moment colonies are expanding fastest in spring. Its faults are entirely about what comes after.

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.
• European dark beeApis mellifera melliferaThe honey bee that was native to northern Europe before anyone imported anything, and one that has been hybridised close to extinction across most of its range. The dark bee is slow to build, frugal, long-lived, and adapted to cold wet summers and long winters — traits that made it unfashionable when Italian stock arrived, and that look considerably more valuable now than they did in 1900.