Texas honey

How honey is produced here

Huajillo honey from the South Texas brush is water white and highly regarded, and it comes from land that is otherwise close to useless. Rainfall governs everything: the brush flowers after rain and gives nothing without it.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 6
• Buttery · 2
• Caramel · 2
• Waxy · 2

Honeys from Texas

• Huajillo honeyWater white · DelicateVery delicate and clean with a light floral sweetness and almost no aftertaste — a honey that stays out of the way.
• Mesquite honeyExtra white · MildMild and smooth with a faint smoky-molasses note that arrives after the sweetness rather than with it.
• Catclaw honeyWater white · MildDelicate and floral with a light sweetness and a faint spicy warmth — one of the gentler American varietals and quite distinct from the darker mesquite honey of the same country.
• Huisache honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrongly floral with a distinct violet and orange-blossom perfume over warm caramel — one of the most obviously perfumed American honeys.
• Cotton honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
• Chinese tallow honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light floral sweetness and a faint waxy note — an unremarkable flavour attached to a very remarkable ecological situation.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.

Plants behind these honeys

• MesquiteProsopisA principal desert forage plant, providing both nectar and pollen in landscapes with very few alternatives.
• CottonGossypium hirsutumA prolonged nectar source from two distinct kinds of gland, plus abundant pollen.
• Chinese tallowTriadica sebiferaAn excellent nectar and pollen source, and the mainstay of Gulf coast beekeeping.
• LemonCitrus limonExcellent nectar over an unusually long and repeated window, and only a moderate pollen contribution.
• Sweet orangeCitrus sinensisA heavy nectar source over a substantial period, and moderate for pollen.

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.
• Long-horned beesEucera and MelissodesSolitary summer bees whose males carry antennae longer than their own bodies, and the group a bee orchid is pretending to be. Several Ophrys orchids produce flowers that mimic the shape, hair and scent of a female Eucera closely enough that males attempt to mate with them, picking up pollen in the process — one of the most extraordinary pollination systems in botany, and one that only works because these particular bees exist.
• Digger beesAnthophoraFast, furry, bumblebee-like solitary bees that hover in front of a flower before darting into it, and among the earliest substantial bees of the spring. The hairy-footed flower bee is the one most British gardeners meet — the females black and the males gingery, so different that they were long thought to be separate species — and it is a specialist of deep tubular flowers that honey bees cannot use.
• Metallic green sweat beeAgapostemonBrilliant metallic green bees of the American grasslands and gardens, and among the most immediately recognisable small bees anywhere. In several species the sexes differ sharply: females are entirely metallic green while males have a green thorax and a boldly yellow-and-black striped abdomen, which leads to a great deal of confused reporting.
• Leafcutter beesMegachileThe bees responsible for the neat semicircular notches cut from rose and lilac leaves every summer. A female leafcutter bee cuts oval pieces of leaf with her mandibles, carries each one back curled beneath her body, and uses them to line and seal a nest cell — the cells end up looking like small green cigars. The damage to the plant is cosmetic and the bee is one of the most efficient pollinators in agriculture.
• 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.
• Fairy beesPerditaThe smallest bees on earth, and among the most specialised. Perdita minima is under two millimetres long — smaller than a grain of rice, small enough that its shadow is easier to see than the bee — and the genus as a whole is a radiation of tiny desert specialists, most of which provision their cells with pollen from a single plant genus and fly for only a few weeks a year.
• 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.