Blackberry Honey
The Story
On the coast of British Columbia the honey year has one centre. From the Fraser Valley across to Vancouver Island and up the Sunshine Coast to Cortes, beekeepers name the same plant as their main flow, and they have been naming it in their own association’s journal since at least 2009, when the Sunshine Coast representative called blackberry blossom “our primary nectar source”.
None of it is planted. The flow comes off verges, railway banks, logged edges and the margins of gardens – ground nobody owns and nobody farms. On Cortes Island, where a community radio report found that island gardens “don’t provide bees with enough food to survive, let alone produce honey”, a beekeeper of twenty-odd years put it plainly: “Cortes’ main honey flow comes from the blackberries.”
A crop that grows on the roadside is exposed the way a roadside is. The same report records – in the reporter’s words rather than the beekeeper’s – that a few years earlier road crews had cut the island’s blackberries back in a single day, and that beekeepers were left with empty hives and fed sugar water to bring their colonies through the winter.
It is reliable enough to plan a year around and not reliable enough to count on. The beekeepers’ journal records the flow failing or shortening in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022 and 2024. Its own word for 2022 was “anti-climactic”.
Characteristics
A sweet, thick honey that sets quickly. The Cowichan Honey Store, on Vancouver Island, describes it crystallising quite quickly but into a smooth, yellow texture, and every British Columbian seller who mentions the set says much the same.
A set jar is not a fault, and Canadian law says so in terms: a Canada No. 1 honey may be “fluid, viscous or partly or wholly crystallized”, and all three are the same grade. No British Columbian blackberry honey has ever been read on a Pfund grader. The only published figure for this honey anywhere is Galician, at a mean of 94 mm, which would put a consumer jar in Canada’s darkest colour class – while the Vancouver Island jar a traveller actually picks up says light in colour. Neither claim has ever been tested, because on a jar that never leaves the province nothing requires it.
Click to Display — The Details: botanical origin, sensory profile, and its regional identity
Nectar Contributors:
- Primary: Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus)
- Secondary: Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus)
- Background: Mixed coastal forage, varying by site (Multiple species, undocumented)
Bee Species:
Western honey bee (Apis mellifera), which is itself an introduction: British Columbia has more than 450 native bee species and none of them makes a surplus anyone can take.
Color:
Light to dark amber, varying batch by batch with whatever else the bees worked
Flavor Profile:
Sweet and full, described from bright and floral to dark and strong
Tasting Notes:
British Columbia sells this honey without pretending it is pure, and that is the local difference. Island Bees, on Salt Spring, tells buyers its blackberry honey “can include lavender, buckwheat, hawksbeard, and many other garden or wildflowers”, so “the taste, aroma, and color can vary between batches making every batch unique but with blackberry being predominant”. The Cowichan Honey Store puts it on the label: a jar of Vancouver Island blackberry honey “with a bit of Fireweed”.
Which is why two sellers a hundred kilometres apart on the same sea describe opposite honeys. Island Bees calls it a darker honey, particularly when liquid, with a stronger flavour than the wildflower honey collected earlier in the year. Cowichan calls it sweet, thick and light in colour. Roberts Creek, on the Sunshine Coast, describes a brightness on the palate followed by sweet warmth.
Island Bees gives the reason, and it is the same reason the flow grows where it does: “Most honey produced in Canada comes from huge fields of flowering monoculture like clover, canola, blueberries and alfalfa. In contrast, much of Salt Spring Island is forested,” so the bees work wildflowers and blooming trees instead. No field, no single crop, no two batches alike.
Aroma:
Perfumed and floral
Forage Origin:
Primary: Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus, Rosaceae). The province’s own nectar-plant bulletin lists it as a major source on the Coast, flowering June and July, and that is the flow the coastal beekeepers mean. Its name is not settled: the province calls it Rubus armeniacus and Metro Vancouver calls it Rubus bifrons, in documents current in the same year, and the monograph on Canadian weeds declines to fix a species at all because Canadian material has never been sequenced. The page follows the province.
Secondary: Trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus, Rosaceae). The only blackberry native to British Columbia, and in Canada it grows nowhere but the province’s southwest corner. The same bulletin gives it a separate line and an earlier window, May and June, and does not mark it major. Nancy Turner calls it tangier and tastier than the Himalayan; it trails where the other arches. Both plants are called blackberry on a jar, no pollen key or chemical marker separates their honey, and nothing published compares the nectar of one with the other.
Background: Mixed coastal forage, varying by site (multiple species, undocumented). What else is in a jar depends on what stood near the hives, and coastal producers say so on the label rather than claiming it away.
Pairings:
Roberts Creek Honey Co suggests its blackberry flower honey drizzled over Greek yoghurt, savoury cheeses or caramelised pears. The Cowichan Honey Store’s own note is simpler: perfect on toast.
Origin Story
Nobody knows when this plant reached British Columbia. E-Flora BC says the 1970s and rests it on a herbarium sheet collected at Pitt Meadows in 1973; Metro Vancouver says the nineteenth century and cites nothing; the standard provincial account of how blackberries took over gives no British Columbia date at all. A herbarium voucher is a first collection, not a first arrival, and the two answers may not even be in conflict – they answer different questions. What the page has instead is a Pacific Northwest chain with the province inside it: sold into the region from 1885, advertised to Pacific Northwest customers by flyer in 1894, and, in the Royal BC Museum’s words, spread along the Pacific coast by 1945 and now widespread in much of the province.
The honey is younger than the plant and its record is thinner still. No first seller has been established and no date of first varietal sale. What the beekeepers’ own journal shows is a honey that was being argued for rather than sold: in 2011 a contributor made the case that a named varietal would be easier to sell than undifferentiated honey, and as late as the winter of 2016 the journal was still listing blackberry among the province’s unexploited specialty honeys, possibilities that consumers would pay a premium for.
By 2019 it was moving in quantity. A classified advertisement in the same journal that autumn offered approximately 6,000 pounds of predominantly Fraser Valley blackberry honey, in thirty-pound buckets, available in September.
Cultural Context
Two of this coast’s languages have a word for the plant, and one of them records what the last century and a half did. The Hul’q’umi’num’ Language and Culture Society gives the native trailing blackberry as sqw’il’muhw, and notes that the same word “is also used to refer to the introduced Himalayan Blackberry”. The nation’s name for the berry that was already here has been extended to cover the one that arrived. In ʔayʔaǰuθəm, the language shared by the Klahoose, Tla’amin, K’omoks and Homalco Nations, the Klahoose language archive records a phrase for it: hɛhaw xəč̓xɛčɩm ta čɩtoxʷənay, the blackberry bush is prickly.
None of that is about honey, and it could not be: the honey bee is an introduction and this record is older than its arrival. What the berry did was sweeten. Theresa Thorne from kwa’mutsun, in the society’s own story archive, on the leaf: “You add it to bitter medicines and it will sweeten it a little.” The Cortes Island Food Book, in an article the Klahoose First Nation reviewed, lists trailing blackberries among the berries that were “major components in many foods to add sweetness, colour and vitamins in the winter months”. Sweetening was a job the berry did on this coast long before anyone here kept bees.
The plant that carries the honey arrived into that. Nancy Turner, who has worked with Indigenous elders and cultural specialists for forty years and was given the Tahltan name Jjie Eghaden, berry woman, puts the arrival plainly: “Europeans are great at bringing their own backyards wherever they go in the world, and that’s been a real problem.” They did not arrive, she says, to terra nullius, but stepped into the gardens of peoples who had advanced systems of cultivating landscapes, from controlled burns to harvesting parts of a plant while replanting others. Leigh Joseph, a Squamish Nation ethnobotanist whose ancestral name is Styawat, describes what followed: “The impact of colonization was separation from the land. That was one of the main, fundamental pillars.” There was an Indian Agent on the reserve, she says, and people had to get a pass from him to go and harvest. For her generation, to live from the land again is a political act.
The picking is still a season the coast arranges itself around. Powell River has held a Blackberry Festival since 1985 – a week-long event at first, revived with provincial funding in 1991, and a street party on Marine Avenue since 1993. In the Cowichan Valley, families pick and bring their buckets to Cherry Point Estate Wines, which keeps a sorting table and a scale outside through the summer and buys from whoever turns up. On Vancouver Island, Jim McMillan picks a disused signal crossing on the E&N line at Esquimalt with three generations of his family, because his grandfather took him along railway banks in Scotland in the early 1950s: “That memory stuck with me.” Pickers and bees want the same hours on the same canes – one Victoria picker’s advice is to go early, before the sun gets too hot and before the bees and wasps are too busy. They do not want the same canes for long, though: the flow is June and July and the picking runs from late July into September, so the honey is made weeks before the berry anyone remembers is ripe. A Coast Salish agency in Nanaimo records the tool that made the work possible – for blackberries, a curved or hooked branch, to reach the fruit without meeting the thorns.
The province’s own museum puts the beekeepers into the ledger, on the same side as the cooks. Its learning resource on the plant opens: “Himalayan Blackberries are loved by cooks for their sweet fruit and by beekeepers for the nectar they provide, but the large, dense, impenetrable thickets are a serious problem for native species.”
Harvest & Forage
The flow runs in June and July, and where you stand on the coast moves it by a few weeks. The province’s nectar-plant bulletin gives June to July for the Coast. The beekeepers’ own regional reports put it mid-June to mid-July on the Lower Mainland, late June through mid-July on the Sunshine Coast, and as early as May and June on the North Shore. One Fraser Valley report has it starting in mid-June and ending around 15 July; in another year it was finished by the third week of July.
What it runs into decides how clean the crop is. In the Fraser Valley the blueberry flow ends at the beginning of June and the blackberry follows not far behind it; on Salt Spring the same hives take lavender, buckwheat and hawksbeard; on Vancouver Island a jar is sold as blackberry with a bit of fireweed in it. Nobody here separates them with a laboratory. No British Columbian blackberry honey has been analysed at all, no pollen key distinguishes the province’s two blackberries, and the federal labelling rule permits the blossom name and asks for no evidence. The reference an analyst would reach for does not contain the plant at all: Canada’s national pollen atlas runs to 244 pages and has no blackberry entry under any of the half-dozen names it carries, and its key sends a coastal grain with fine striations to entry 161, Rubus idaeus – raspberry.
So the tool is the calendar and the placing of the hives. A Sunshine Coast operator’s forage year runs catkins, willows and Oregon grape; then maple, wild cherry, arbutus, plum and salmonberry; then the main blackberry flow; and then the hives go up the mountain for fireweed. Taking the crop off between one flow and the next is what makes it blackberry honey. The frames come off by eye at that operation, each one cherry-picked at seventy-five per cent capped or better.
Beekeeping Context
This is a small-operator crop. A Sunshine Coast beekeeper documenting his own business for the provincial association describes a sole proprietorship of seventy-five to a hundred hives, apiaries held to no more than twelve colonies and happiest at ten, honey sold at farmers’ markets and on consignment, and a honey house inspected once a year by Vancouver Coastal Health. His club has thirty-nine registered members and its oldest beekeeper was ninety, with fifty years behind him. On Cortes, where the gardens cannot feed the bees, keepers watch each other’s colonies because a sick bee can fly five miles across a small island.
The plant they depend on is not a noxious weed in British Columbia. The province is willing enough to name plants noxious and has not named this one; what it has is a place on a regional containment-and-control list, and municipal bylaws on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast that require removal. Removal is expensive. Governments in Metro Vancouver spent almost $350,000 managing it in 2016, and one contractor called in by both the province and municipalities has been at the work for seventeen years.
The timing is where the policy meets the flow, and the province’s own documents disagree about it. Its species factsheet tells a crew that can manage only one pass a year to make it “when the plants begin to flower”, because by then the root reserves have gone into flowering – which is the opening of the honey flow. Its roadside guide for maintenance contractors says “all plants should be controlled before they flower and set seed”, and the twelve-month calendar on the same page shows blackberry flowering in April and May only. Followed literally, one document puts the annual cut in the first week of the flow and the other puts it a month or two before. Both are current provincial guidance, and the roadside calendar gives the earliest flowering window of any source anywhere.
What the work costs a city is on the record. Richmond’s council asked staff in 2023 to review options to accelerate eradication, and the staff report that came back in May 2025 answered that the plant’s spread “places it within the control stage of management, suggesting that eradication is no longer viable”. The city spends $162,500 a year on blackberry alone, and the largest single line, $75,000, is roadside: flailing and mowing where overgrowth obstructs sightlines and encroaches on paths. That is the same roadside the hives are placed to reach.
What makes this more interesting than a conflict is that the people doing the removing already know about the bees. Metro Vancouver’s own best-practice document concedes it in terms – Himalayan blackberry “provides nectar and pollen for bees” – and then tells crews what to do about it: where there is little other vegetation nearby, consider removing only a quarter of an infestation each year, and plant something that flowers across the season in its place. The same document carries the case against the plant just as plainly: restored areas in the region’s parks held 26 per cent more pollinator species, and pollinators 30 per cent more abundant, than ground left mostly to Himalayan blackberry. A honey that depends on a plant being removed slowly is an unusual thing to be able to buy.
Named Producers
Cowichan Honey Store – Duncan, Vancouver Island. Sells a local blackberry honey in a 375 ml jar and says on the label what is in it: Vancouver Island blackberry with a bit of fireweed. Its own description is the one most travellers will meet – sweet, thick, quick to crystallise into a smooth yellow texture, and light in colour. Ring ahead or take the chance: a single-flow honey sells out.
Island Bees – 160 Donore Road, Salt Spring Island. Its blackberry honey is the other half of the island disagreement: a darker honey, particularly when liquid, and stronger than the wildflower taken earlier in the year. The company tells buyers plainly that batches differ because the bees also work lavender, buckwheat and hawksbeard. Sold on-island at Country Grocer and Natureworks and in Victoria at Lifestyle Markets on Douglas Street; check with the shop before travelling for it.
Roberts Creek Honey Co – Roberts Creek, Sunshine Coast. A sole proprietor running seventy-five to a hundred hives with no web shop, selling at markets and on consignment. Blackberry flower honey is the operation’s comb honey and, in its own words, blackberry flowers are considered its main nectar flow. It took a blue ribbon with the honey in 2019. Market stock varies week to week.
Honeybee Centre – 7480 176 Street, Surrey. A producer and packer with a walk-in store open all year, and the likeliest place on the mainland to find blackberry honey on a shelf rather than at a market – though its own city shop, the Main Street Honey Shoppe in Vancouver, was dry of it through September 2026 while the Surrey store had it. Worth a call.
Honeyview Farm – Aldergrove, packing at Langley, trading also as Worker Bee Honey Company at Rosedale. The deepest single-blossom range in the Fraser Valley, and the only one offering blackberry blossom in five sizes from a 500 g squeeze bottle to a five-kilo pail.
Golden Meadows Honey Farm – 19950 Old Dewdney Trunk Road, Pitt Meadows, trading also as West Coast Bee Supply. A producer selling only what its own bees make, and honest about what that means: blueberry blossom and fireweed every year, and “sometimes Wildflower & Blackberry Honey too”. Ask at the farm.
Country Bee Honey Farm – 6440 West Saanich Road, Saanichton. Sells a blackberry honey sourced from hives in Vancouver and names the origin on the jar, which is worth knowing on an island where most honey is local. Its own description corrects the commonest expectation of this honey: “It doesn’t actually taste like blackberries, but it does get its delicious sweet flavour from the blackberry flowers.”
Barry’s Bees – Victoria and the Pender Islands. Barry Denluck, an accredited Bee Master and a BCHPA certified instructor of beginners’ beekeeping, has kept bees here for more than twenty years and takes a Pender Island blackberry honey off the 2025 harvest. Sold at markets rather than from a shop, so what is there depends on the week.
Festivals and Fairs
- Powell River Blackberry Festival – Marine Avenue, Powell River, qathet region (third weekend of August; in 2026 a street party on Friday 21 August, 6-10pm, and the Blackberry Jam on Saturday 22 August, 12-8pm): a community street party held in one form or another since 1985 and named for the berry that ripens free for the picking across the region that month.