Clover and Canola Honey

Bee Species:

The Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, makes all of it. The prairie’s colonies were once killed each autumn and replaced each spring with package bees – a few pounds of bees and a queen shipped in a screened box – from the United States; that border closed in 1987, the industry now overwinters, and the packages it still buys come from overseas: Alberta’s 2024 survey put 94 per cent of package purchases at imported bees. A second managed bee shares the seed fields: the alfalfa leafcutter bee, Megachile rotundata, a solitary bee stocked by the tens of thousands on the hybrid canola seed fields beside the honey bee colonies, and the pollinator of the alfalfa seed crop; it makes no honey. The country’s bee story, the closed border and the wintering sheds, is on the Canada honey hub.

Color:

White to water white as a liquid, ivory once set; a Peace River jar may grade Golden or read light amber.

Flavor Profile:

Mild and sweet, lightly floral; where canola dominates, a stronger green note that European rapeseed descriptions call cabbage-like.

Tasting Notes:

Creamed, it is smooth and spreads like soft butter; a Manitoba producer says his customers eat it from the spoon. Liquid, it is thin and very sweet and does not stay liquid long. Sellers who name canola call it “mildly sweet” (Elham) or “delicately sweet” (Wolfe Honey); a Cut Knife beekeeper who packs sweet clover and alfalfa instead calls canola “a stronger flavor”; Eliese Watson, a Calgary beekeeping educator, told a Senate committee in 2014 that pure canola honey “has a stinky flavour to it”; the European rapeseed sheet lists “spoiled and vegetal” among its aromas. Peace River clover, sold in Surrey, “can often have an after-taste of cinnamon” (Honeybee Centre). Where clover leads the jar, Quebec’s Intermiel calls its creamed clover “the great classic golden honey of North America”, with “the pleasant bitterness of the clover flower”.

Aroma:

Faint; fresh-floral with a warm, vegetal edge on the European rapeseed descriptive sheet; little aroma once creamed.

Defining Compounds:

Glucose. Canola nectar carries glucose and fructose in about equal measure and no sucrose (Kevan, Lee and Shuel, 1991; Pernal and Currie, 1998), and the European rapeseed descriptive sheet gives the honey 40.5 grams of glucose to 38.3 of fructose in a hundred, a fructose-to-glucose ratio of 0.95 and a glucose-to-water ratio of 2.37, past the line at which honey sets within a month. A Canadian retail survey put clover-labelled honey at 1.12 to 1.13 (Shao and colleagues, 2026), on the same fast-setting side. One residue now matters to the trade: quinclorac, which Alberta Agriculture’s laboratory found in 9 of 30 commercial honeys at up to 31.5 micrograms a kilogram (Thompson, 2024) – below Canada’s limit of 100 and above Japan’s default of 10, the limit the Japanese buyers apply.

Forage Origin:

The honey comes off farmland. Three nectar flows run on the prairies in most years and only the middle one is harvested: the spring flow is left in the hive for the bees, most of the late flow is left too, and the main flow between the end of June and the end of July fills the supers (Alberta Agriculture, 1998).

Spring, late April to mid-June: willows and dandelion, worked for colony build-up; nothing of it reaches the jar.

Summer, the harvested flow, end of June to end of July: canola, Brassica napus, the mustard-family oilseed bred at the University of Manitoba and at Saskatoon in the 1970s and seeded across 23.45 million acres in 2026 – 13.4 million in Saskatchewan, 6.6 million in Alberta, 3.2 million in Manitoba and 112,000 in British Columbia’s Peace River country. One field in bloom “can nourish bees for up to a month” (Canola Council); heat and drought cut it short. Blooming with it: sweet clover, Melilotus albus and M. officinalis, a Eurasian biennial legume that spread across the prairies in the 1910s and 1920s as forage and soil-builder and now holds the roadsides and the “white alkali” soils where cereals fail; the true clovers, alsike Trifolium hybridum, white T. repens and red T. pratense, sown for hay, pasture and seed; and alfalfa, Medicago sativa, on 5.9 million acres of hay and pasture across the four regions (2021 Census), whose flower a honey bee robs from the side without tripping it, leaving the seed fields’ pollinating to leafcutter bees.

Late summer, August into September: second-blossom alfalfa, sunflower, borage and buckwheat where they are grown; usually left for the bees' winter stores.

The only pollen survey of prairie honey, on 1983 samples, found nearly every jar came from one kind of flower, canola among the predominant pollens in all three provinces beside the clovers; a Quebec research station’s own summer honey of 2022 read 84 per cent mustard-family pollen – “most likely canola or mustard”, the analysts said – to 12 per cent clover. No government statistic apportions the crop; the Canola Council’s Curtis Rempel told the Senate in 2014 that “about 80 per cent of the honey produced in Canada is from canola”.

Pairings:

Creamed, on bread and toast, the way the prairie eats it; Quebec’s Intermiel calls its creamed clover a “very velvety honey with a butter texture” and Japan’s Yamada recommended its Canadian clover “for bread and fruit liqueurs”. In the glass, Genesee Brewing’s Honey Brown Lager, brewed in Rochester, New York, with “pure Manitoba White Clover honey” by the brewery’s release of October 2020.