Tanzania honey

How honey is produced here

Miombo woodland beekeeping in the western regions is the mainstay, using bark hives hung in trees and harvested with smoke. Tanzanian beeswax is as commercially significant as the honey and is exported at scale.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 7
• Fruity · 4
• Woody · 3
• Smoky · 2
• Citrus · 2
• Floral · 2

Honeys from Tanzania

• Miombo honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and warm with a distinct woody, faintly smoky depth and a caramelised sweetness — the smoke comes partly from the harvest method and partly from the woodland itself.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Coffee blossom honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStrongly floral — jasmine and orange blossom over a light caramel base, with no coffee character whatsoever.
• Cashew honeyAmber · PronouncedTangy and resinous with a warm caramel base and a faintly astringent finish — assertive and quite unlike the mild nut it comes from.
• Combretum honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and caramel-led with a dried-fruit depth and a faint woody dryness. A robust everyday honey rather than a delicate one.

Plants behind these honeys

• BaobabAdansonia digitataA good nectar and pollen source for the brief period the flowers are open.
• SesameSesamum indicumA good nectar and pollen source, and unusual in offering nectar from two different kinds of gland.
• CoffeeCoffea arabicaA heavy but very short-lived nectar source, in flushes rather than as a continuous flow.
• CashewAnacardium occidentaleA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the tropics.
• BushwillowCombretum speciesA major and under-documented African honey source, second only to the acacias across much of the savannah belt.

Bees associated with this origin

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Africanized honey beeApis mellifera scutellata hybridsThe most misreported animal in this catalogue. Africanized honey bees are ordinary western honey bees with African ancestry, and they differ from European stock in degree rather than in kind: they respond to disturbance faster, commit more workers to defence, and pursue an intruder further. They are not more venomous, they do not hunt people, and they make perfectly good honey. The name that stuck to them came from a 1970s press cycle, and it has outlived every attempt to correct it.

Honey in Tanzania

Hadza honey hunters in the north work with the greater honeyguide, and the partnership here has been quantified rather than assumed: honey is a large share of the diet in season, and guided finds are a measurable part of it. Hadza hunters are also recorded deliberately withholding wax from the bird, on the reasoning that a hungry bird guides again — which is the counter-example that keeps the reciprocity account honest.

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.

• Hadza honey gatheringHoney hunting · Practised, decliningAmong the Hadza of northern Tanzania honey is a large and measured share of the diet, several bee species are taken by different methods, and the honeyguide partnership operates on terms that contradict the tidy reciprocity story.
• Log hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA hollowed section of trunk, closed at both ends, with a small flight hole. The most widespread hive form on earth, in continuous use from Ethiopia to the Himalaya to the Yucatán, and the direct ancestor of both the Egyptian clay cylinder and the modern top-bar hive.
• Bark hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA cylinder of bark stripped whole from a living tree, sewn or pegged into a tube and hung high in the miombo woodland. It supports one of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere, and it raises a genuine and much-argued question about the trees.
• 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.
• Top-bar hivesHive system · Widespread living practiceA horizontal hive in which bees build comb down from removable bars rather than into frames. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s as an intermediate technology, with a Greek movable-comb precedent from around 1800, and neither traditional nor a frame hive.
• African stingless bee harvestingStingless-bee keeping · Practised, decliningMeliponula and related genera harvested from ground and tree nests across sub-Saharan Africa, valued medicinally and priced well above Apis honey, and almost entirely absent from the international meliponiculture literature.
• Miombo woodland beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceHanging bark cylinders in the miombo woodlands of south-central Africa, in numbers, and selling the honey and wax into a trade that has run for well over a century. One of the largest traditional beekeeping economies anywhere.
• Honey beers and ferments of sub-Saharan AfricaCultural use · Local living practiceFermented honey drinks made across a wide band of sub-Saharan Africa, from the Xhosa iqhilika of South Africa to the honey beers of Central African forest communities.