Western Australia honey

How honey is produced here

Jarrah honey has an unusually low glucose content, which makes it slow to crystallise and gives it a high measured antimicrobial activity. Eucalypt flowering here is boom and bust, with heavy years separated by lean ones. The jarrah forest is threatened by Phytophthora dieback spread on vehicle tyres and boots.

Flavour signature

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

• Caramel · 5
• Malty · 3
• Woody · 3
• Molasses and treacle · 2
• Floral · 2
• Resinous · 2

Honeys from Western Australia

• Jarrah honeyAmber · PronouncedDark, malty and caramelised, with a coffee-and-treacle depth and much less of the medicinal edge a comparably dark honey usually carries.
• Karri honeyAmber · PronouncedRich and layered — malt and dark caramel with a dried-fruit depth and a long warm finish. The most complex of the Western Australian honeys.
• Marri honeyExtra light amber · MildMild, sweet and buttery with a soft caramel warmth and only the faintest eucalypt lift.
• Western Australian wildflower honeyExtra light amber · ModerateComplex and variable, generally warm and lightly caramelised with a resinous myrtaceous lift and considerable site-to-site difference.
• Banksia honeyAmber · PronouncedStrong, malty and savoury with a burnt-caramel depth and a distinctly salty-mineral edge.
• 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.

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.
• BanksiaBanksiaTop nectar production in the catalogue for sheer volume per flower head, delivered in the Australian cool season when little else is open.
• JarrahEucalyptus marginataA major nectar and pollen source in years when it flowers heavily.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.