Tasmania honey

How honey is produced here

Production is directly limited by access to remaining old-growth rainforest, which ties the honey's future to forestry policy.

Flavour signature

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

• Resinous · 2
• Caramel · 2

Honeys from Tasmania

• Leatherwood honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedPowerfully perfumed and slightly spicy — musk, warm blossom and something faintly balsamic. Distinctive to the point of being polarising.
• 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.

Plants behind these honeys

• LeatherwoodEucryphia lucidaThe principal summer nectar source of the Tasmanian rainforest, and the basis of most of the island's honey production.
• 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.

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.