Fireweed Honey

Bee Species:

Western honey bee (Apis mellifera). British Columbia has no native honey-producing bee, so every fireweed crop is made by imported or provincially raised European stock.

Color:

Water-clear to dark amber, varying with elevation and how late in the season it was taken

Flavor Profile:

Mild, clean and lightly fruity

Tasting Notes:

Producers reach for the same two words. A Creston operation calls its fireweed “an unique, very light, mild, buttery honey”, and a Terrace apiary gives “subtle fruity notes and a smooth, buttery finish”. Buttery, and the champagne of honeys, are trade language used by nearly everyone selling the honey, and are worth reading as such.

Buyers say something sellers do not. The note that recurs across shop reviews and forums is that this is the honey that converts people who dislike honey.

A peppery or spicy finish is reported often enough to be worth naming, and it does not belong to this province: every instance found traces to Oregon or Alaska.

The nearest thing to a structured sensory record is Finnish, from a panel working to the International Honey Commission’s method: dry hay, pale malt, apple, brown sugar, grapefruit and almond paste, with a weak odour and a short to medium finish. Its authors record that North American fireweed honey carries a different phenolic profile from theirs, so it is a comparison and not a description of a British Columbian jar.

Aroma:

Light and delicate, with faint fruit

Defining Compounds:

What is measurable about fireweed honey has been measured in Finland rather than in British Columbia, and the numbers explain the one thing everyone notices. Across thirty-two Finnish samples the honey ran about 41 per cent fructose against 30 per cent glucose, with a glucose-to-water ratio of 1.87. That ratio is the index the crystallisation literature finds predictive; the more familiar fructose-to-glucose ratio predicts poorly, at about one case in seven. Low glucose against the water present is why the jar stays clear. The same series records fireweed as the most acid of the Finnish varietal honeys, at pH 3.8.

An older international dataset reaches nearly identical figures from different samples in a different decade, which is the reason to trust them. Neither describes a British Columbian jar: the Finnish authors record that North American fireweed honey carries a different phenolic profile from theirs.

Forage Origin:

Primary: fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium, Onagraceae). What the bees take is nectar from its flowers. The trade and most older writing call the plant Epilobium angustifolium; Canada’s national plant register and British Columbia’s own botanical atlas both now use Chamaenerion. The English name is not exclusive: several unrelated plants are called fireweed, ragworts in the daisy family among them, so the binomial and not the common name identifies it. Away from bees the plant has its own uses, the young stalks eaten, the stem fibre twisted into twine, the seed floss worked into bedding. It spreads by rhizome and by a plumed seed light enough to stay airborne for hours, and it germinates only on bare mineral soil in full light, which is why it arrives after fire and logging rather than under standing forest. On a burn its cover peaks two to three years on. On a cutblock north of Prince George it was absent in the first year after logging, noticeable in the third and in great numbers in the fourth. Then the canopy closes over it and it thins away; it is gone from stands three centuries old. Ground that has burned or been cut is therefore on a clock. Ground that people keep permanently open is not: British Columbia holds about 77,700 hectares of transmission corridor clear of trees on a cycle of four to twelve years, and cutting does not remove fireweed, because cut stems send up more shoots. The flower spike opens from the bottom upward over several weeks, so a plant carries ripe seed at its base while it is still flowering at the tip, and bees taking nectar work the lowest flowers first. The pollen is unusually large, between 51 and 100 microns, and bound together by viscin threads that make it cling in ropes rather than travel loose. A bee working the spike for nectar starts at the bottom, where the oldest flowers have already shed, and carries what pollen it does pick up on the outside of itself, which is why so little fireweed pollen ends up in fireweed honey.

Secondary: clovers (Trifolium spp., Fabaceae). Which clovers, and how much of them, depends on the ground the hives stand on. Where colonies are trucked into the mountains their keepers report almost nothing else in flower. Where hives stay on the valley floor clover is the steady companion: a Squamish beekeeper says she had her fireweed honey pollen-tested and that it came back mainly fireweed and clover, and yellow clover comes directly after the flower on the jar she sells. British Columbia’s nectar-plant bulletin marks alsike, sweet, red and white Dutch clover as major nectar producers, several of them flowering through the same July and August weeks.

Background: mixed summer forage, varying by site (multiple species, undocumented). What else reaches the comb is the open question of this honey. Wild raspberry takes the same cleared ground, and Finland’s beekeepers name it the main obstacle to a clean fireweed crop; British Columbia’s bulletin marks raspberry a major producer on the coast and in the south interior a month ahead of fireweed, so the two meet at the join of the season. Peter Awram, who is building a chemical reference library of Canadian honeys, suspects mountain lots also carry pearly everlasting, other mountain flowers and honeydew. Pearly everlasting does grow on the same logged ground across almost all of British Columbia, though the provincial bulletin does not mark it a major nectar producer and puts its bloom later in the year. And the aphids that feed on fireweed itself peak with the flow, so part of what comes in from a fireweed patch can come off the plant rather than out of its flowers.

Pairings:

British Columbian kitchens use it sparingly and mostly without saying whose it is. A Duncan brewery brews with a named Vancouver Island fireweed honey; Bar Oso in Whistler serves fireweed honey with sobrasada, and names no producer.

The honey is mild, which is the quality producers and buyers name most often, and it pours straight from the jar months after harvest without being warmed. Both of those decide more about how it is used than any flavour note does.