Kangaroo Island Ligurian Honey

Bee Species:

Kangaroo Island honey is made by Apis mellifera ligustica, the Ligurian bee – the same species kept everywhere else in Australia, but a distinct Italian strain, and on Kangaroo Island a population kept to itself since the 1880s. That isolation is the bee’s whole significance for the honey. The island holds one of the most intact surviving populations of the strain, sought by breeders on the mainland and abroad for its queens, and it is the reason a jar of Kangaroo Island honey is the work of one bee and no other.

Color:

Medium to dark amber, and clear – the mixed-flora island honey sits in the middle of the range, while the single-flower honeys drawn from the same bees run paler (sugar gum, spring flora) or darker (the mallees, banksia).

Flavor Profile:

Full and rounded, medium-bodied, the caramel-toffee tone of the island’s eucalypts over a wildflower base; the single-flower honeys range from light and delicate to dark and resinous.

Tasting Notes:

Kangaroo Island honey, the mixed-flora honey that carries the island’s name, is a medium amber honey of full, rounded flavour – the caramel and toffee of its eucalypts laid over a lighter wildflower sweetness. It is an everyday honey with more depth than most.

Around it sits an unusual range of single-flower honeys, because the island’s producers work each flow on its own. They run from the pale, delicate sugar gum – light, clean, a note of caramel or salted butterscotch – through buttery cup gum and citrus-touched pink gum, to the dark, full-bodied mallees and banksia, caramel and toffee over a resinous, bush-flower finish. The rarest, worked off the island-endemic mallee-ash, is rich and velvety, tasting of creme brulee, burnt sugar and candied pecan. One island, one bee, and a whole shelf of honeys, no two alike.

Aroma:

Warm and eucalypt-forward, with a soft wildflower note; more resinous in the darker single-flower honeys.

Forage Origin:

Primary: sugar gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx, Myrtaceae). A tall South Australian eucalypt, planted across the state and well beyond as a windbreak, and the source of Kangaroo Island’s best-known honey. It grows through the island’s farmland and parks and carries a heavy summer flow. Sugar gum honey is made on the mainland too, so it is the one Kangaroo Island honey whose distinction is the bee and the island rather than the tree.

Secondary: cup gum (Eucalyptus cosmophylla, Myrtaceae). A South Australian eucalypt of the Mount Lofty Ranges, the Fleurieu and Kangaroo Island, named for its cup-shaped fruit. It flowers only every three or four years, and rarely in quantity, which keeps its honey scarce – smooth and buttery, and the base of the island’s award-winning creamed honey. Few if any producers bottle a cup gum honey off the island.

Secondary: narrow-leaf mallee (Eucalyptus cneorifolia, Myrtaceae). The mallee that gives Kangaroo Island its roadside arbours and, distilled, its eucalyptus oil. It grows in dense stands across the island’s east; the same tree occurs in scattered mainland pockets, but it is the island that bottles its honey – medium-amber, caramel and toffee with a salty-sweet, faintly resinous edge. The eastern woodland it forms is listed as a critically endangered ecological community, though the tree itself is not threatened.

Supporting: Kangaroo Island mallee-ash (Eucalyptus remota, Myrtaceae). A mallee of the island’s rugged western end, from Mount Taylor to Flinders Chase, and a tree that grows nowhere else on earth. Its flow is small and uncertain, so its honey is a rare, small-batch release sold in numbered jars – rich and velvety, with the burnt-sugar and candied-pecan character of creme brulee. It is the one Kangaroo Island honey that can be made in no other place.

Supporting: pink gum (Eucalyptus fasciculosa, Myrtaceae). A smaller eucalypt of South Australia and western Victoria, common on the island’s poorer soils. Its honey is pale gold and light, with a gentle citrus-and-vanilla note.

Supporting: banksia (Banksia spp., Proteaceae). The coastal heath and scrub banksias, a non-eucalypt source that flowers into the cooler months when little else is out. Their honey is dark and bold, toffee over a lingering bush-flower finish.

Background: boobialla (Myoporum insulare, Scrophulariaceae). Native juniper, a coastal shrub of the island’s dunes and heath, and one of the mixed flora behind the coastal and wildflower honeys. It stands here for the broader background – melaleuca, bottlebrush, stringybark and spring pasture flowers – that fills out the island’s lighter and multifloral jars.

The island's own trees: the mallee-ash and the narrow-leaf mallee

Two of the island's mallees carry more of Kangaroo Island's character than any other honey plant. The Kangaroo Island mallee-ash, Eucalyptus remota, grows on the rugged western end and nowhere else on earth, so its honey is the one that can be made in no other place. It was always a small, uncertain flow -- but the 2019-20 fires burned the western end hardest and destroyed nearly all the mallee-ash, which takes up to seven years to grow back, so while the mallees regrow there is much less available. It reaches the shelf rarely, in numbered jars, sold only direct from the producer.

The narrow-leaf mallee, Eucalyptus cneorifolia, is the tree a visitor actually sees: it forms the dense green arbours that arch over the island's eastern roads. The same tree is distilled at Emu Ridge, the only eucalyptus-oil distillery in South Australia, so one species gives the island both a honey and an oil. Its eastern stands make up the Kangaroo Island Narrow-leaved Mallee Woodland, listed as a critically endangered ecological community -- a status that belongs to the woodland as a whole, not to the tree, which is common enough to line the roads. It grows in a few mainland pockets too, but the honey is the island's.

Close section

Pairings:

The everyday Kangaroo Island honey – the medium-amber mixed-flora one – is a good all-round table honey: full enough for toast and porridge, for yoghurt and a cheeseboard, for tea and for baking. Being an ordinary table honey, it cooks and bakes without fuss.

The single-flower honeys reward matching. The pale, delicate ones – sugar gum, cup gum, pink gum – suit the lighter jobs: a drizzle over ricotta or a soft goat’s cheese, a spoon through yoghurt, the honey for tea. The dark mallees and banksia stand up to stronger company: an aged cheddar or a blue, sourdough and butter, the bitterness of black coffee. And the rarest – the creme-brulee-sweet mallee-ash, the site-named releases – are worth meeting on their own, on a spoon or a plain cracker, where nothing gets in their way.

Health Uses:

Kangaroo Island honey is raw, unheated and organic, kept clean by the same isolation that keeps the bee pure – no antibiotics, no chemical treatments, and none of the fine filtering or heating that strips a commodity honey of its pollen and enzymes. Beyond that it is used as any good honey is: a spoonful in hot water for a cold, a coat for a sore throat, a raw honey taken for its own sake.