United States honey

How honey is produced here

American beekeeping is now organised around pollination rather than honey: the almond bloom in California draws well over a million colonies each February, more than half the managed hives in the country, in the largest managed pollination event on earth. Honey is increasingly the by-product of a haulage business.

Flavour signature

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

• Floral · 19
• Caramel · 15
• Fruity · 9
• Buttery · 9
• Herbaceous · 8
• Vegetal · 7
• Spicy · 6
• Molasses and treacle · 6

Honeys from United States

• Clover honeyExtra white · MildWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
• Alfalfa honeyExtra white · MildMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
• Orange blossom honeyExtra white · ModerateUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
• Tupelo honeyExtra white · MildButtery and clean with a pear-and-green-apple lift, and a long soft finish that never turns cloying.
• Sourwood honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedSpicy and aromatic — anise and clove over a caramel base, with a dry, almost tannic finish that stops it being merely sweet.
• Gallberry honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral warmth and a faint bitterness on the finish that the name hints at without quite delivering.
• Saw palmetto honeyLight amber · PronouncedSmoky and peppery with a warm resinous depth — an unusual and slightly savoury honey that divides opinion sharply.
• Mesquite honeyExtra white · MildMild and smooth with a faint smoky-molasses note that arrives after the sweetness rather than with it.
• Buckwheat honeyDark amber · IntenseMalt, molasses and wet straw, with a savoury, almost animal depth. The most polarising honey in general production.
• Basswood honeyWater white · PronouncedIntensely aromatic with a mentholated, faintly medicinal lift over a clean sweetness — one of the most distinctive American honeys and among the most divisive.
• Goldenrod honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong, warm and spicy, with a hay-and-clove character and a slightly astringent finish. Assertive in a way that surprises people expecting an ordinary golden honey.
• Aster honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStrong and slightly sharp with a hay-and-herb character and a distinct sour edge that fades as the honey ages.
• Fireweed honeyWater white · DelicateVery delicate, buttery and faintly tea-like, with a clean finish and almost no aftertaste. A honey that rewards attention and disappears if you are not paying any.
• Sunflower honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStraw, beeswax and pollen, with a slightly waxy mouthfeel and a fresh, faintly herbal edge.
• Cotton honeyExtra white · MildMild and clean with a faint green-vegetal note and very little else — a background honey.
• Blueberry honeyExtra light amber · ModerateTangy and lightly fruity with a green, slightly astringent edge — recognisably related to the berry without tasting of jam.
• Cranberry honeyLight amber · ModerateTart and fruity with a genuine cranberry acidity — one of very few honeys where sourness is a real part of the profile.
• Avocado honeyDark amber · IntenseDark, buttery and molasses-rich with a savoury, almost salty edge. Nothing about it suggests the fruit.
• Star thistle honeyExtra light amber · ModerateLight and clean with a distinct anise-and-cinnamon lift and a fruity sweetness underneath. Delicate but not blank.
• Sage honeyWater white · MildMild, clean and slightly herbal, with a heavy silky body that is more of the experience than the flavour is.
• Mountain laurel honeyExtra light amber · PronouncedReported as bitter and sharp with a burning sensation in the throat, though the toxin is not reliably detectable by taste — which is the single most important fact about it.
• Tulip poplar honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, buttery and malty with a smoky caramel depth and much less bitterness than its colour suggests.
• Red maple honeyExtra light amber · ModerateWarm and lightly caramelised with a faint woody note — a straightforward honey, and one that surprises people expecting it to taste of maple syrup.
• Black mangrove honeyExtra light amber · ModerateLight and clean with a distinct saline-mineral edge and a faint smoky note — the salinity is genuine and reflects the tidal ground the trees grow in.
• Titi honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light floral sweetness and no strong distinguishing character — the honey itself is unremarkable, which is why nothing about it justifies the cost to the colony.
• Soybean honeyWater white · MildVery pale and very mild, with a clean light sweetness and almost nothing to distinguish it. Its virtue is neutrality.
• Milkweed honeyWater white · MildExceptionally perfumed for such a pale honey — a clean floral sweetness with an almost tropical lift. Regarded as a delicacy where it can be produced in quantity.
• Spanish needle honeyExtra light amber · MildLight, mildly fruity and clean. An easy, agreeable honey rather than a dramatic one, which is exactly what an all-year background source produces.
• Sumac honeyAmber · PronouncedTart, dark and lightly resinous, with a sour-fruit edge unusual in an American honey and a definite tannic dryness.
• Safflower honeyExtra light amber · MildLight amber and mildly nutty, with a faint thistle bitterness at the finish. Unassertive and rather more interesting than most crop honeys.
• Carrot seed honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, savoury and faintly medicinal, with a green umbellifer note and a slightly bitter finish. A challenging honey and an interesting one.
• Almond blossom honeyLight amber · PronouncedDistinctly bitter with a marzipan aroma over it — one of the few honeys where bitterness arrives before sweetness, and an acquired taste even among people who like bitter honeys.
• Cabbage palm honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, smoky and savoury with a mineral saltiness and only moderate sweetness — an unusual and polarising honey.
• Persimmon honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and fruity with a dried-date depth and a warm caramel base — one of the more distinctive minor American varietals and genuinely reminiscent of the ripe fruit.
• Purple loosestrife honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and tangy with a distinct green herbal note over dark caramel — an unusual profile that some tasters find sharp and others find refreshing.
• Bamboo honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and buttery with a distinct tang, frequently compared with a lighter buckwheat — malty and slightly sharp rather than sweetly floral.

Plants behind these honeys

• White cloverTrifolium repensOne of the very few plants that is both a top-tier nectar source and a substantial pollen source, over a long season, at landscape scale.
• AlfalfaMedicago sativaExcellent forage on paper, and the tripping mechanism complicates it in practice: a honey bee robbing nectar from the side of the flower collects no pollen and delivers none.
• 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.
• Ogeechee tupeloNyssa ogecheExceptional nectar in a short window, in a habitat with little competing bloom at that moment. Its value is concentration in time and space rather than volume across a season.
• SourwoodOxydendrum arboreumA serious nectar source with very little pollen to offer, which is a useful illustration of why the two are rated separately: sourwood feeds foragers superbly and contributes almost nothing to brood rearing.
• GallberryIlex glabraAn excellent late-spring nectar source across the southeastern coastal plain.
• Saw palmettoSerenoa repensA heavy spring nectar and pollen source across a very large area.
• MesquiteProsopisA principal desert forage plant, providing both nectar and pollen in landscapes with very few alternatives.
• BuckwheatFagopyrum esculentumGenuinely useful as a late-summer gap filler, and its speed from sowing to flower makes it one of the few forage plants that can be deployed tactically within a single season.

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.
• 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.
• Common eastern bumblebeeBombus impatiensNorth America's commercially reared bumblebee, produced by the million for glasshouse tomato and berry pollination, and the continent's counterpart to Europe's buff-tailed bumblebee in both usefulness and controversy. It is abundant, adaptable and thriving while several of its relatives collapse — and its commercial rearing is implicated in some of those collapses.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Honey in United States

Lorenzo Langstroth patented the movable-frame hive in 1852 after working out bee space — the gap bees will not build across — and every modern hive descends from it. The honey bee itself is not native to the Americas; it arrived with European colonists in the 1620s.

Deciding between two of them

• Clover vs alfalfa honey — The two great mild legume honeys of North America and northern Europe. They are genuinely similar, and the differences are small enough to be worth stating precisely.
• Sourwood vs tupelo honey — The two most prized honeys of the American south. Tupelo is famous for never setting; sourwood is famous for its aroma, and both are scarce for reasons of geography.