Victoria honey

How honey is produced here

River red gum along the Murray is the state's signature flow and depends on flooding cycles that river regulation has substantially altered. Victorian beekeepers also supply a large share of the colonies for the Sunraysia almond bloom.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 10
• Resinous · 6
• Floral · 5
• Woody · 3
• Malty · 3
• Buttery · 3
• Phenolic and medicinal · 2

Honeys from Victoria

• River red gum honeyLight amber · PronouncedStrong and warmly medicinal — the classic eucalypt register, with caramel underneath and a menthol lift at the end.
• Mallee honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a light caramel sweetness and a faint eucalypt lift — approachable and consistent.
• Stringybark honeyLight amber · ModerateFull and malty with a clean eucalypt aromatic edge and a slightly dry finish. A robust everyday honey by Australian standards.
• Yellow box honeyExtra white · MildMild, smooth and lightly floral with a buttery weight and a faint eucalypt lift at the very end.
• Yellow gum honeyExtra light amber · MildClean and mildly aromatic with a soft finish — the gentlest of the commercial eucalypt honeys and a good introduction to the group.
• Grey box honeyExtra light amber · ModerateClean and lightly caramelised with a faint buttery quality — mild for a eucalypt honey and highly regarded for its density and smoothness.
• Messmate honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong and resinous with a malty depth and a faintly medicinal eucalypt lift — assertive and unmistakably Australian.
• White box honeyExtra light amber · MildClean and lightly caramelised with a faint buttery smoothness — mild, dense and highly regarded within Australia.
• Prickly box honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness and a faint honeyed-almond note — pleasant and considerably gentler than leatherwood.
• 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.
• Banksia honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong, malty and savoury with a burnt-caramel depth and a distinctly salty-mineral edge.
• Salvation Jane honeyExtra light amber · MildMild and clean with a soft floral sweetness — pleasant, unassertive and produced in enormous quantity.
• Wilga honeyLight amber · ModerateWarm and faintly spicy with a clean finish, and without the camphor edge that runs through the eucalypt honeys of the same landscape.

Plants behind these honeys

• 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.
• StringybarkEucalyptus macrorhyncha and related speciesOne of the mainstays of Australian commercial honey production, valued for both a heavy nectar flow and good pollen.
• Yellow gumEucalyptus leucoxylonAmong the most valuable winter forage trees in southern Australia, and widely planted in shelterbelts and street plantings for that reason.
• Prickly boxBursaria spinosaAn excellent summer nectar and pollen source, and among the most heavily visited plants in southeastern Australia.
• BanksiaBanksiaTop nectar production in the catalogue for sheer volume per flower head, delivered in the Australian cool season when little else is open.
• Viper's buglossEchium vulgareAmong the most productive nectar plants in the European flora per flower, and a good pollen source alongside it. In New Zealand, naturalised echium is a significant commercial honey source under the name blue borage.
• WilgaGeijera parvifloraA dependable inland source when the rains have come, and one of the few trees that gives the western New South Wales apiaries anything at all in winter.

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.
• Australian stingless beeTetragonula carbonariaAustralia's social native bee, kept in boxes by a growing number of hobbyists and used commercially to pollinate macadamia. It builds a brood comb in a rising spiral — a genuinely beautiful structure unlike anything else in the bee world — stores honey in separate resin pots, and produces a tart, medicinal honey that Aboriginal Australians have harvested as sugarbag for many thousands of years.
• Blue-banded beeAmegillaFast, stocky solitary bees marked with brilliant iridescent blue or white bands, and among the most effective buzz pollinators anywhere. They grip a flower and vibrate their flight muscles at a frequency that shakes pollen out of tubular anthers — the technique tomatoes require and honey bees cannot perform — which has made them the subject of serious commercial pollination research in Australia.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.