Pine Honeydew Honey

Bee Species:

The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, in every country where this honey is made. No subspecies is tied to the honey at source. The Marmaris register describes the bee of its district as dark and calm, a good winterer that eats little of its honey and gathers much propolis, the tree resin bees use to seal the hive.

Color:

Light brown to very dark brown; the spring honey lighter and clearer than the autumn crop

Flavor Profile:

Resinous and woody, mildly sweet, soft in the throat

Tasting Notes:

Thick and slow to pour, and easily told from blossom honey by tasters. Greek researchers describe no sharp taste or aroma; the Marmaris register describes a honey less sweet than blossom honey that does not catch the throat.

A beekeeper in the hills behind the Côte d’Azur describes his mountain pine honey as long and round in the mouth, with notes of chocolate and liquorice, and a French retailer describes a Greek pine honey as little sweetened, with a slight bitterness and a thick texture.

Aroma:

Woody, resinous and balsamic, sometimes fruity or waxy

Defining Compounds:

Its minerals, read as electrical conductivity, mark it as a honeydew honey: Greek pine honeys average about 1.1 millisiemens per centimetre and Turkish ones about 1.4, against the 0.8 the European rule asks of honeydew honey, and Greek law and the Turkish registers set a floor of 0.9, raised to 1.09 for Marmaris. Muğla’s application to the European Union adds two markers of its own, potassium of at least 1,900 milligrams a kilogram and two pine-scented compounds, alpha- and beta-pinene, among its aroma compounds, higher in Muğla’s honey than in Antalya’s or the northern Aegean’s.

Forage Origin:

Pine here means the genus Pinus. Two of its species carry nearly all of this honey: Turkish pine, which covered about a quarter of Turkey’s forest area at a 2004 count, and Aleppo pine, its western counterpart around the Aegean. The European forest atlas records that in Greece and Turkey the honeydew released on these pines by the giant pine scale insect is still used to make honey. Stone pine, the umbrella pine of the Italian coast and the tree of the pine-nut groves, carries the same insect in Turkey and a different one in Italy.

The giant pine scale insect, Marchalina hellenica, lives in the bark crevices of the lower trunk, under tufts of white waxy wool, with its mouthparts in the tree’s sap stream. Only the nymphs feed and give off honeydew; the adult has no mouthparts. One generation a year, hatched from eggs laid in April in Greece, feeds through the summer and autumn and gives the flow.

The nymphs stop feeding for a few days while they moult in early autumn, so the flow dips and returns two to three weeks later. Overwintered nymphs give a second flow in spring, which ends when the adults appear. How much the insects give depends on their size and age, cold February days set up the spring flow, and under a warming climate the cycle is expected to shorten sharply, which is why the harvest months vary from year to year.

Greece encouraged beekeepers to spread the insect through its pine forests from 1996 to 2000 and has banned the practice in Attica since 2005 and near towns and in protected forests since 2008, while forest scientists still differ over how much it harms the trees.

Italy’s pine honeydew comes from another insect, the pine tortoise scale insect, Toumeyella parvicornis, a North American species now on Italy’s stone pines. Its nymphs and adult females feed on the twigs, with at least three overlapping generations a year in Campania, and the later stages give off honeydew in large amounts; Lazio’s beekeepers now take a pine honeydew from it, mostly near the coast.

In Spain, Provence and Slovakia the pine honeydew is an aphid honeydew, and the sellers name only aphids. A German association of honeydew watchers says the insects on pine seldom or never build up in the masses a flow needs; a beekeeper in the hills behind the Côte d’Azur gathers his mountain pine honey about once in ten years, and a Slovak one makes his in the years the aphids multiply. Greece and Turkey make the scale-insect honey in quantity; Italy, Spain, France and Slovakia are listed here because beekeepers there take and sell a honeydew from pines made by other insects, in smaller and less regular crops.

The same words go on syrups boiled from pine shoots or cones with sugar, made without bees; a Bulgarian maker of borov med says on its own page that its jar is a preserve and not honey. In Crete the pine honeydew runs naturally into the thyme honey harvested beside it, which is how the island’s protected blend arises. A little nectar comes in with the honeydew: Greek pine honeys carry chestnut, heather and legume pollen, much of it stored spring pollen washed out of the combs at extraction, the spring honey carries pine pollen, and Turkish honeys hold a scatter of pollen from the daisy, heather, carrot and rockrose families.

Pairings:

Sellers pair it with aged cheeses, roast and game meats, duck and spice bread, and stir it into herbal tea and warm milk; Turkish packers also offer it for desserts made without refined sugar.