Oak Honeydew Honey

Bee Species:

The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, everywhere this honey is made. The Slavonski med specification ties its seven honeys, the oak honeydew among them, to the native grey bee of the Pannonian plain, Apis mellifera carnica. In Colombia the oak’s honeydew is gathered by Africanised bees descended from Apis mellifera scutellata (Chamorro and colleagues, 2013).

Color:

Very dark amber to near black, with a greenish tint in some liquid honeys; light brown or grey once set; holm-oak honeydew a shade lighter and redder

Flavor Profile:

Medium sweet and malty, with caramel and dried fruit; a salty edge in Spanish jars, a slightly sour and bitter finish in Bulgarian ones

Tasting Notes:

Caramel, malt and dried fruit lead in every official description read for this page, Italian, Bulgarian and Spanish alike, and the aroma is of medium or low intensity rather than the strong resinous nose of a fir honeydew. What differs is the finish. The Liébana designation in Spain describes clear salty components that damp the sweetness; the Strandzha designation in Bulgaria a slightly sour and bitter aftertaste; the Kırklareli register in Turkey compares the taste to pekmez (grape molasses). Colombian beekeepers told the entomologists who identified their honeydew’s insect that the honey was dark with an intense caramel flavour.

Aroma:

Moderate rather than strong: caramel, dried fruit, malt, brewer’s yeast and wood

Defining Compounds:

Minerals first, and potassium among them: from about 1,600 mg/kg in the Strandzha specification to 5,600 in the Kırklareli register. The minerals are what the honey’s electrical conductivity measures, and the figure is how a laboratory confirms a honeydew honey: 0.8 to 1.4 millisiemens per centimetre (mS/cm) across the designations and studies, above the 0.8 floor the Villuercas-Ibores designation sets for its honeydew honey. The Kırklareli register’s mean of 0.84 sits at the bottom of that range, with some batches below it, so conductivity alone does not settle a Kırklareli jar.

Phenolic compounds, the family that gives tea and red wine their astringency, run higher in deciduous-oak honeydew than in holm-oak honeydew, and so does the antioxidant activity they carry; the deciduous-oak honeys measured darker, which is the difference a buyer sees between the two jars on a shelf.

The honeydew sugars are regional rather than a rule. Strandzha honey carries four to eleven percent melezitose with erlose, a smaller sugar of the same insect-made kind, and its specification lists quercitol, an oak sugar alcohol, and kestose, another small sugar, as marks a laboratory can test for; Spanish oak honeydews measure under one percent melezitose, and the 2019 study warns that these sugars are a poor way to tell honeydew honeys apart. The low ratio of glucose to water in the Spanish honeys, 1.4 to 1.6, is what the same study expects to make them slow to set.

Forage Origin:

The oaks are everywhere and the honey is not. Sessile and pedunculate oak, the two common oaks of Europe, grow from Scandinavia to Iberia, and the downy oak across the whole of the centre and south; yet the honey is sold from Mediterranean and sub-Mediterranean pockets: the Pyrenean-oak and holm-oak woods of western Iberia, the central and southern Apennines, the mountain forests of Greece, the Hungarian oak forests of the Balkans and Turkish Thrace, and beyond Europe the Persian oak of the Zagros and the Andean oak of Colombia. Italy’s national descriptive sheet calls it an occasional crop, locally not negligible. Further north it comes rarely, in single jars and single years, from Thuringia, Slovakia and Poland.

Several insects make it, on different parts of the tree and at different times. The giant oak aphid feeds on twigs and small branches, and in southern Europe also on sweet chestnut; the common oak aphid on the undersides of the leaves; Thelaxes dryophila, an aphid tended by ants, on shoot tips and leaf midribs. The oak scale, Kermes quercus, is a scale insect of the bark, and in May its adult females produce honeydew in such quantity that it coats the tree and dribbles down the trunk. Italy’s sheet gives the calendar: the scale from April to June, the aphids from May into September, the common oak aphid in June and July. In Bulgaria’s Strandzha the first honeydew cells appear in the comb from about the middle of May. In Colombia the insect is a bark scale that sits under the bark of the Andean oak and lets its honeydew fall in drops through a hollow waxy filament; the beekeepers of Boyacá and Santander had sold the honey as oak honey for years before the entomologists found the insect.

The flow is a summer one, and heat brings it on. The Kırklareli register gives air above 30 C with mild nights; the Çanakkale register 30 to 35 C by day and dew on the ground; a beekeeper in the Sierra de Gata, in western Spain, gives a window of 30 C by day and 14 at night. Wind and cold end it in every source that speaks of it, and rain washes it off for a time. The designations’ texts differ on whether the flow needs dry weather or damp.

In Croatia’s Požega basin, in Turkey and in Iberia, beekeepers, three registered designations and some researchers describe a second source beside the insects: a sap that seeps from the acorns as the tree sheds its surplus in a heavy crop. The Croatian specification calls it medenje žira (acorn honeying). The same Hungarian oak carries aphid honeydew in Bulgaria’s Strandzha, and the Montesinho beekeepers who report the acorn sap on their own oaks call it a hypothesis that research has not confirmed.

Nectar comes in with the honeydew where something is flowering. The Liébana designation in Cantabria writes heather and bramble nectar into its oak honeydew honey; at Kırklareli and in Strandzha the flow is kept apart from the nectar plants, and elsewhere whatever blooms in the woods comes in unmeasured.

Most of these honeys carry the honeydew in their name, melata, miellat, manov, spadziowy, but an oak name alone does not always mean honeydew: some sellers in Iran and the Balkans describe their oak honey as nectar. In Umbria, honeydew that once came mostly from oak now comes partly from the planthopper behind Metcalfa honeydew honey, and a DNA study of Italian honeys found Metcalfa the only sap-sucking insect in one Lombardy honey sold as oak honeydew. Chestnut honey from the same woods can be hard to tell from it, since the giant oak aphid feeds on both trees.

Pairings:

Producers’ suggestions: an Italian producer of melata di quercia pairs it with robust aged cheeses, pecorino, parmigiano and caciocavallo, and a Spanish producer of miel de encina puts it on a cheese board; the Italian also suggests it in desserts, the Spaniard in sauces for meat.