Thailand honey

How honey is produced here

Longan honey from the Chiang Mai and Lamphun orchards is the commercial mainstay and is exported in quantity. Apis mellifera dominates the commercial sector; Apis cerana and wild dorsata supply local and speciality markets.

Flavour signature

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

• Fruity · 8
• Caramel · 6
• Floral · 5
• Resinous · 3
• Molasses and treacle · 3
• Phenolic and medicinal · 2

Honeys from Thailand

• Longan honeyLight amber · PronouncedIntensely aromatic — caramel, dried tropical fruit and a distinctive musky floral note that is unlike anything in the European catalogue.
• Lychee honeyExtra light amber · ModerateDelicately floral with a distinct rose-and-lychee perfume, and a clean sweetness underneath that keeps it from being heavy.
• Kelulut honeyLight amber · PronouncedDistinctly sour and tangy with a fruity, almost fermented character — closer to a sharp fruit syrup than to what most people expect honey to taste like.
• Rubber tree honeyLight amber · MildMild and slightly vegetal with a light caramel warmth — an unremarkable flavour attached to a genuinely remarkable production story.
• Tualang honeyAmber · IntenseSharply sour and dark, with a fermented-fruit tang over a molasses base — genuinely unlike any temperate honey, and an acquired taste.
• Durian honeyAmber · IntensePungent, savoury and unmistakably related to the fruit — a sulphurous undertone over dark caramel. It divides opinion as sharply as durian itself.
• Rambutan honeyLight amber · ModerateSoft, floral and faintly muscat — closer to lychee honey than to anything temperate, and gentler than most tropical honeys.
• Tamarind honeyLight amber · ModerateAmber, warm and distinctly tart, with a caramel body and a sour-fruit edge that does echo the tamarind pod.
• Mango blossom honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and fruity with a distinct tropical-stone-fruit note and a faint resinous edge — one of the honeys that does taste recognisably of its tree's fruit, though more faintly than people expect.
• Gelam honeyAmber · PronouncedSharp and aromatic with a distinct medicinal eucalyptus-like lift over a caramelised base — assertive and unmistakably from the myrtle family.

Plants behind these honeys

• DurianDurio zibethinusA short, intense and unreliable flow, worked in the narrow overlap between when the flowers are open and when bees are flying.
• RambutanNephelium lappaceumA reliable orchard flow, and one where bee pollination measurably lifts fruit set — most rambutan trees carry functionally male and hermaphrodite flowers and need the transfer.
• TamarindTamarindus indicaA valuable hot-season source across India and the Sahel, and one of the few substantial flows available immediately before the rains.
• MangoMangifera indicaA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the tropics.

Bees associated with this origin

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• KelulutHeterotrigona itamaThe bee behind Southeast Asia's stingless honey industry. Heterotrigona itama is larger than most Asian meliponines, takes readily to log and box hives, and produces enough honey to have supported an industry that barely existed before 2000 and now has its own national standard in Malaysia.

Honey in Thailand

Home to several Apis species harvested in quite different ways: giant honey bees taken from forest trees, dwarf honey bees taken casually from open branches, and rafter beekeeping recorded in the south, in which a plank is set to invite a colony that will not live in a hive. Bee brood is eaten here as ordinary food rather than as a curiosity.

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.

• Dwarf honey bee harvestingHoney hunting · Widespread living practiceThe small, common, unremarked harvest. Apis florea builds a single palm-sized comb around an open branch, holds a modest amount of honey, and is taken casually across South and Southeast Asia by people who would not describe themselves as honey hunters.
• Giant honey bee harvesting in mainland Southeast AsiaHoney hunting · Practised, decliningHarvesting Apis dorsata across Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, where the same migratory bee is taken from forest trees, from cliff faces and from wooden rafters set out to attract it. One bee, several quite different relationships with it.
• Kelulut keepingStingless-bee keeping · Widespread living practiceStingless beekeeping across Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand that has expanded rapidly from a traditional base into a commercial sector, bringing with it price premiums, health claims and an authenticity problem arriving at the same speed.
• Honey in Buddhist traditionCultural use · Widespread living practiceHoney among the substances monastics may store as medicine, an offering narrative attached to a festival, and a modern argument about whether honey is ethically consumable that reaches different conclusions.