Spruce Honeydew Honey

Bee Species:

The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, in every country where this honey is made. A Slovenian beekeepers’ society notes that only the native Carniolan bee, Apis mellifera carnica, may be kept in Slovenia, and describes it as a good worker of the fir and spruce flows.

Color:

Red-brown and clear, with a shine on the surface; Italian descriptions run from light to dark amber, sometimes with reddish glints

Flavor Profile:

Malty and spicy with a sourish edge, moderately sweet, resinous

Tasting Notes:

Very viscous and stringy: Slovenia’s specification says it sticks to the tongue and the palate. Italy’s national union of beekeepers’ associations describes a honey of medium intensity, not very sweet and persistent, milder than fir honeydew. The aroma moves from resin and bark toward herbal sweets, roasted coffee, dried fruit and figs in the Slovenian sheet; the Italian panel’s words include condensed milk, malt, panna cotta, caramel, smoky and faintly balsamic, and tasters from Italy’s honey-sensory association who learned the honey in the Val di Fiemme noted pastry, balsam and damp woodland.

Aroma:

Resin, damp wood, caramel and malt, with notes of spruce-tip syrup, conifer bark and dried apricot

Defining Compounds:

Its character in the laboratory is set more by the insect than by the tree: the three-part sugars melezitose and erlose are made by the insects or the bees, not the plant. In spruce honey from aphid honeydew melezitose is the leading three-part sugar; in honey from the bud scale insects erlose runs significantly higher, a difference the researchers read only from the whole profile of sugars, amino acids and minerals together; and these larger sugars reach up to a tenth of the fir and spruce honeys tested from Baden-Württemberg. In the honeydew itself the large black aphid Cinara piceae gave about half of its sugars as melezitose and Cinara pilicornis about a third in a 2020 study, and a 2022 study found the share rising with heat; a honey carrying more than about 10 to 12 percent melezitose crystallises in the comb and is hard to extract, by the Swiss federal research station’s threshold for melezitose honey. Minerals, read as electrical conductivity, mark it as a honeydew honey: Germany’s guidelines ask spruce honey for at least 0.80 millisiemens per centimetre and Slovenia’s 2025 specification sets its spruce honey at 0.9 or more, and a honey under its country’s floor is not what that country’s sheet calls spruce honey.

Forage Origin:

This honey is sold as Fichtenhonig (spruce honey) in Germany, melata di abete rosso (spruce honeydew) in Italy, smrekov med (spruce honey) in Slovenia, smreková medovica (spruce honeydew) in Slovakia and miód spadziowy iglasty świerkowy (conifer honeydew honey, spruce) in Poland, while in Austria it is sold inside Waldhonig (forest honey), the name Austria’s food code lists as a synonym of honeydew honey, with some beekeepers naming the spruce. Wherever it is made, spruce honey means a honeydew honey: in Germany’s honey guidelines, in Slovenia’s protected specification and in the Italian, Slovak and Polish names, which carry the honeydew word. The German word also goes on a ‘false’ Fichtenhonig made at home from blossom honey steeped with spruce shoots, and Greek fir honey was on sale in Denmark and the Netherlands under spruce words in October 2026. A German jar may carry both tree names together, Fichten- und Tannenhonig (spruce and fir honey), where both flows were gathered in the same season from the same place, and in Italy and Switzerland abete and Tanne, the one word for fir, cover spruce as well, which is why the Silver Fir Honeydew Honey page tells the two trees’ honeys apart.

Spruce here is Norway spruce, Picea abies, the tree of the Alps and the central European uplands, native from the Balkan mountains to Scandinavia and east to the Urals and planted far outside that range since the eighteenth century as what the European forest genetic resources programme calls the most used conifer in plantation forestry; its timber goes to building, paper and the soundboards of pianos and violins. Rottanne in German and abete rosso in Italian both mean red fir, but it is a spruce, and spruce and fir carry different insects and give different honeys.

Seven insects on spruce give the honeydew, five bark aphids and two bud scale insects, and each feeds in its own place on the tree. The red-brown bark aphid Cinara pilicornis, which the Hohenheim researcher Gerhard Liebig called by far the most important producer on spruce, feeds in colonies on the new shoots; the large black Cinara piceae sits on the trunk and the thick inner branches; Cinara costata feeds on slow-growing twigs and, the southern German observers say, gives no flow of its own in their area; and the two bud scale insects, Physokermes hemicryphus and Physokermes piceae, which differ to the eye only in size, sit in the whorls at the base of the shoots, in young, dense stands and, in outbreak years, on older spruce. The aphid colonies are founded by stem mothers, the females that hatch from the overwintered eggs, and their winged daughters or granddaughters make a dispersal flight of a week or two, during or just after which the flow can start; the bud scale insects pass one generation a year, their young wintering at the tips of the shoots and spreading over the tree as crawlers, the mobile young, in high summer, so the number that spread in one summer decides their flow the next.

As a rule the aphids multiply only while the spruce is putting out its new shoots, and on spruce, Liebig wrote, they keep to that almost as a law. Once the flush is over the sap loses its food value and the colonies collapse: the insects pull out and walk down toward the trunk, Cinara pilicornis first and Cinara piceae last, and the collapse takes one to four weeks from its start to its end, sooner in summer heat. If every producer joins in, a spruce flow can run for more than six weeks; one species alone gives two or three. Rain does not wash the aphids off the tree, as many beekeepers conclude; it grounds the bees and rinses the honeydew from the needles. Wasps eat no bark aphids, Liebig wrote, and the spruce collapse comes well before their numbers peak; the aphids’ true enemies, parasitic wasps and predatory beetles and bugs, accompany the collapse and in some years take part in it. What makes an aphid year, by the forecasters’ rule, is a warm November followed by a cold March, a warm April and a cold May and June, probably because the tree’s reserves build in autumn and are mobilised while cold snaps stall the flush; a very cold November almost always means a failed year, drought can do what cold does, and the observers now add a wet autumn to the list. The bud scale insects need a dry summer the year before, when their crawlers spread.

Which insect dominates a flow decides what comes out of it. The aphids make melezitose out of concentrated sap, and spruce, whose shallow roots leave it short of water in drought, may concentrate its sap, the researchers suggest; the bud scale insects make little of it even on the same trees. The large black aphid Cinara piceae makes the most and Cinara pilicornis less. While the other aphids’ honeydew comes in alongside, the forest honey can still be extracted; when the pilicornis failed in 2024 in the observers’ southern German area, probably after April and May rain, the large black aphid’s honeydew set the crop in the comb. In Germany it may not be labelled Melezitosehonig (melezitose honey), and the Bavarian bee institute suggests naturtrüber Waldhonig (cloudy forest honey) as its name.

Which insect leads differs by district. On the Black Forest observers’ southern plots the spruce flows of 1987 to 1998 came from aphids, the bud scale insects joining in only in 1998, and then modestly; the Upper Palatinate group harvested flows from the bud scale insects in the Upper Palatinate Forest, the Thuringian Forest and the Erzgebirge, three ranges of Germany’s centre and east, the Czech beekeeping magazine Domácí med calls one bud scale insect, by its Czech name, the most important producer, and Baden-Württemberg’s big spruce years of 2016 and 2017 were years of the bud scale insects. Where the bark beetle has thinned the spruce, a Czech honey-trading firm says the aphids went with the trees; a Swiss beekeeper writes that spruce weakened by dry years has given no forest flow in his region; and the southern German observers still recorded spruce flows in 2024 and 2025. Nectar comes in with the honeydew, and can even determine the crop, from what flowers nearby: raspberry and blackberry in the southern German observers’ forests, raspberry in Slovakia’s Orava, lime in the Sudetes.

Pairings:

A South Tyrolean seller’s listing, read in October 2026, offers spruce honeydew honey as a spread on bread, to sweeten tea and as an aromatic ingredient in savoury dishes and marinades.