Blueberry Honey

Bee Species:

Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) everywhere but one county of Guizhou, where the Asian honey bee (Apis cerana) makes the honey. On the rabbiteye of the American South the native southeastern blueberry bee sets the fruit best, by the federal research service’s trial, and makes no honey a beekeeper can harvest.

Color:

White to light amber; the Nordic wild-berry honeys peach-gold to reddish-brown

Flavor Profile:

Mild, fruity but subtle, honey-sweet with a slight tartness; the Nordic wild-berry honeys tarter and heavier

Tasting Notes:

The description that several labels on two continents copy comes from one tasting. The US National Honey Board’s published line is that blueberry honey “has an aroma of green leaves with a touch of lemon”, is “moderately fruity in flavor” and has “a delicate, slightly buttery finish”. The sheet behind it, from thirteen trained panelists at a contract laboratory in Minnesota tasting a sample of unstated origin some time before 2002, records a flowery aroma with green, unripened fruit and lemon, a fruity flavour, and an aftertaste of molasses and prune that lingers. Producers describe their own jars in their own words: the colour of a tea infusion and deeply sweet on the Polish pages of Roztocze and Warka, which share one wording; peach-gold with apricot and chocolate from Finnish Lapland; and, from an Indiana farm with its own bushes, “a dark, spicy honey favored by those who like strong-tasting foods”. A Lower Saxony house sells its plantation honey as cultivated-highbush honey with no added blueberry flavouring, and a Washington producer’s label says the taste varies with whatever else is in bloom.

Aroma:

Faintly fruity; the panel behind the US description recorded green, unripened fruit and lemon

Defining Compounds:

The sugars split by plant. Canadian jars sold as blueberry honey and two American samples of the 1950s measure a fructose-to-glucose ratio of about 1.1 to 1.3, an ordinary honey that sets slowly to moderately; China’s Changbai highbush honey 1.17, in the same range; Finland’s lingonberry sheet, the nearest measured relative of the bilberry honeys, 1.48, a honey its laboratory calls rich in fructose and slow to granulate; and Guizhou’s rabbiteye honey is the one measured jar with more glucose than fructose, at a ratio of 0.94, with an acidity above China’s national limit that its chemists call one of its characteristics. Vitamin B3, niacin, is the published authenticity marker for Canadian blueberry honey, on the Canadian page, which its developers hope inspection agencies will adopt; a Chinese team has proposed four markers of its own for the country’s blueberry honeys. Blueberry pollen is one of four pollens a Canadian reference names as normally under-represented in honey, so a pollen count understates what the bees actually worked.

Forage Origin:

Primary: highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum, Ericaceae). The planted bush of the supermarket berry, grown in rows on farms from the Fraser Valley to the Lüneburg Heath and the coast of Peru, and the plant behind most of the jars on this page. The flower is a small white bell that hangs mouth-down, and a honey bee pushes in for a nectar that is nearly all fructose and glucose, with sucrose rarely found. A Polish field study rated the bush a very good nectar plant: 20 to 50 milligrams of sugar from each flower over its three-day life, 30 to 50 kilograms of honey a hectare from a young plantation, and honey bees 93 to 98 percent of the visitors, so a beekeeper who sets hives in a large block can expect a crop. The crop is not always blueberry. When a German institute set production hives inside the Heath plantations for three seasons, the honey held one to two percent blueberry pollen against 86 to 91 percent rapeseed from fields a kilometre away. Blueberry pollen also travels in stuck four-grain clusters that seldom reach the honey, so a jar that is mostly blueberry can look, under the microscope, like something else.

Secondary: wild lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium, Ericaceae). The shin-high shrub of the sandy barrens of eastern Canada and Maine, never planted, and the plant behind the blueberry honey of Quebec, the Maritimes and Maine. Maine harvested 19,500 acres of it in 2025, a drought year. The two North American plants often share a jar: a Massachusetts house trucks its hives to the pine barrens of New Jersey and the blueberry barrens of Washington County, Maine, and labels its blueberry honey with both. The lowbush honey, how it is made and what has been measured of it are on the Canadian page.

Supporting: bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus, Ericaceae). The wild blueberry of the European forest floor, ankle-high under pine and birch, and the plant behind the honeys of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Latvia. Finland’s beekeepers’ association says a pure bilberry honey comes only from Lapland, off a bloom of about a week, and a Finnish laboratory found nearly half the pollen in the country’s lingonberry honey to be Vaccinium, bilberry among it, so bilberry is in Finnish jars that are not named for it. Sweden’s association rates the plant a middling nectar source and notes that the bees eat much of what they gather. A Latvian beekeeper at Ugale sells the one laboratory-typed bilberry honey the record holds: 30 percent bilberry pollen in one 2024 batch and 74 percent in another from a site three kilometres away. In Norway it is usually sold with lingonberry and wild raspberry in the same jar, as forest-berry honey.

Supporting: rabbiteye blueberry (Vaccinium virgatum, Ericaceae). The blueberry of the American South, where the plant gives the least honey of the four. Georgia has more blueberry acres than any other state, and its university’s bee programme tells growers never to expect a beekeeper to lend colonies “in return for the honey they’ll make”, because almost no crop in Georgia yields a surplus. A North Carolina farm with nine hundred of its own hives on a hundred acres of southern highbush, the low-chill blueberry bred for the South, had its spring honey analysed and found no blueberry pollen in it at all, and the federal research service found that one native bee and the honey bee raise the fruit set, the share of flowers that go on to form a berry, the honey bee with no special fit to the flower. Two Florida apiaries do bottle a blueberry honey, one from its own hives, the other from hives near the fields. The exception to all of it is Majiang County in Guizhou, where the province began planting blueberries in 2000 and where the Asian honey bee works the rabbiteye. China’s bee-products association calls it the only county in the country producing blueberry honey commercially, the province’s chemists call Guizhou the only province, and the company that keeps the bees says why: blueberry plantations elsewhere in China yield little nectar or none, only its patch at Xuanwei town flows, and its whole year’s blueberry honey is under five tonnes.

Background: spring forage within flight range of the fields, varying by country and site (multiple species, undocumented). Rapeseed in Germany and Poland, dandelion in British Columbia, the June forest flowers of Quebec: whatever blooms while the hives stand on the contract enters the same combs.

Pairings:

The honey is mild enough to go where the berries go: over the fruit, over yogurt, into muffins. An Indiana farm that makes a dark one suggests barbecue sauces and mead. In Quebec the two crops of the plant are served together, honey over berries, and the Canadian page carries the region’s own uses.