Vietnam honey

How honey is produced here

Vietnamese production is heavily export-oriented and has been the subject of sustained anti-dumping and adulteration scrutiny in the United States. Coffee blossom from the Đắk Lắk highlands is the largest single flow.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 5
• Floral · 4
• Resinous · 3
• Fruity · 3
• Vegetal · 2

Honeys from Vietnam

• Coffee blossom honeyExtra light amber · ModerateStrongly floral — jasmine and orange blossom over a light caramel base, with no coffee character whatsoever.
• Rubber tree honeyLight amber · MildMild and slightly vegetal with a light caramel warmth — an unremarkable flavour attached to a genuinely remarkable production story.
• Mangium honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, malty and lightly resinous, with a savoury depth that reads as honeydew rather than as blossom.
• 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.
• Cashew honeyAmber · PronouncedTangy and resinous with a warm caramel base and a faintly astringent finish — assertive and quite unlike the mild nut it comes from.
• Gelam honeyAmber · PronouncedSharp and aromatic with a distinct medicinal eucalyptus-like lift over a caramelised base — assertive and unmistakably from the myrtle family.
• Tea blossom honeyExtra light amber · ModerateMild and creamy with a distinct faint bitterness and a green vegetal note that is recognisably tea-like — an unusual profile and a divisive one.

Plants behind these honeys

• CoffeeCoffea arabicaA heavy but very short-lived nectar source, in flushes rather than as a continuous flow.
• MangiumAcacia mangiumA substantial plantation flow across Southeast Asia, produced by a mechanism most beekeeping literature does not cover — extrafloral nectar, secreted by the leaf rather than the flower.
• CashewAnacardium occidentaleA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the tropics.
• TeaCamellia sinensisA good late nectar and pollen source, arriving when the season is otherwise closing.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• African honey beeApis mellifera scutellataThe tropically adapted African honey bee that, crossed with European stock in Brazil in 1957, produced the Africanized populations of the Americas. In its own range it is simply the honey bee of eastern and southern Africa — productive, mobile, defensive, and superbly adapted to heat, drought and a formidable list of predators including honey badgers, ants and hive beetles.