Erica Heather Honey

Botanical Name: Heaths (Erica spp.)

Botanical Family: Ericaceae

Bee Species:

Honey is the product of Apis mellifera in European Union law, and no Erica honey comes from another species. What the Erica designations add is the subspecies. Corsica requires the island’s own ecotype of Apis mellifera mellifera and bars imported stock; two Portuguese designations admit only the local Iberian bee. No designation for a ling honey found in this round names a subspecies at all.

Which bees can work an Erica depends on the shape of its flower. Most Erica flowers are small urns, narrower at the mouth than at the middle, and those are the ones bees pollinate. In the Cape, where most of the genus lives, many species have long red tubes and are pollinated by birds; the working bee there is Apis mellifera capensis, a fynbos specialist that does poorly when it is taken out of it.

Color:

Amber to very dark amber, with orange or red lights in the liquid honey; brown with orange tones once it has set

Flavor Profile:

Caramel and cooked sugar over a marked acidity and a light bitterness, with the sweetness moderate rather than forward

Tasting Notes:

An Erica honey runs when the jar is turned on its side; a ling honey does not, and the British judges’ guide makes that a pass or fail rather than a timed test. The property behind it, thixotropy, belongs among the heathers to ling alone, and the test works only while both honeys are liquid.

A honey that runs can still be a thick one. The Comunidad de Madrid measured its Erica arborea honey at 5,807.9 g for viscosity against 814.3 g for its rosemary honey: six or seven times as resistant as the jars beside it, and still pourable.

The honey is cloudy even freshly extracted, because it carries crystalline matter that does not dissolve. And in the Basque Country the custom is to beat these honeys to a fine cream, which leaves the jar paler than its floral origin would otherwise warrant.

Aroma:

Caramel and cooked sugar, a damp-woodland note of wet leaves and earth, aromatic wood, and anise or liquorice

Defining Compounds:

The caramel has a chemical basis, and two independent 2021 studies found the same class of compounds at opposite ends of the range. A study of 33 north-west Iberian honeys and a study of 25 Greek autumn honeys share a subset of degraded carotenoids: safranal, isophorone and 4-oxoisophorone among them. The Greek authors name the class outright, writing that many of the compounds they found are degraded carotenoids related to heather honey. That these are what a taster is calling caramel is this page’s inference from the compound class, and no source states it.

The same two studies disagree. The Iberian team found hotrienol in 82 per cent of its samples, averaging 45.7 per cent of the volatile fraction, and concluded that hotrienol could be a clear marker for all heather honey; the Greek team reports that hotrienol was not detected in any of its samples. Both were peer-reviewed and both were working on Erica: the Atlantic heaths and the Aegean heath are chemically different honeys sold under one word.

Diastase behaves unusually here, and it inverts how a laboratory sheet reads. The International Honey Commission lists Erica among only five European honey types in its low-enzyme exception, at a measured minimum of 3.7 Schade units, the scale diastase is reported in, and Italy writes the derogation into its national sheet at not less than 3 units provided HMF stays under 15 mg/kg. So on an Erica honey a low diastase figure is the plant and a high HMF figure is the fault, though the honey is not always low in enzymes.

No mineral analysis of an Erica honey was found; what is supported is the conductivity, which is a proxy for mineral content, and the European directive exempts Erica by name from its general 0.8 mS/cm ceiling, so a reading above that ceiling is no evidence against the jar. The one bioactivity study done on Erica honey itself, on Portuguese monofloral honeys, found hydrogen peroxide the most important of four factors tested – the ordinary honey mechanism, made by an enzyme the bee adds and destroyed by heat and light.

Forage Origin:

The bees take nectar from the flowers of shrubs in the genus Erica. It sits in a ring of tissue inside the base of a small urn-shaped corolla whose mouth is narrower than its middle, and in most species the pollen is shed in tetrads; the few Cape species that shed single grains give the honeys South Africa’s reference describes as slow to set. Most of the genus is knee-high scrub; the exception is the tree heath, Erica arborea, which reaches over five metres. That plant came out of the East African mountains and colonised the Mediterranean more than once, so the shrub that gives Corsica its spring honey gives the Ethiopian highlands theirs.

Six species carry a honey sold under its own name – Erica arborea, E. cinerea, E. tetralix, E. manipuliflora, E. multiflora and E. carnea – and the regional variants below take them one at a time.

Four landscapes carry the genus. In the Mediterranean maquis the tree heath takes light, deep, acid ground and not limestone. On the Atlantic seaboard wetness splits two species, bell heather taking the dry sunny slopes and cross-leaved heath the wettest ground, where ling will not go. In the Western Cape the genus is a biome: Erica species are the main source of fynbos honeys, in the words of South Africa’s national bee-plant reference, and every jar there is sold under the biome’s name rather than the plant’s. The owner of Overberg Honey Co says the main nectar of his dark fynbos honey is Erica.

Heath is a stage between cleared ground and closed forest. In 1927 a botanist writing on Algeria put tree heath in the hilly parts of cork-oak forest that people, fire or grazing had opened, and saw in Kabylie that in well-kept forest the oak tends to eliminate it. An Erica crop is therefore a crop off worked ground: where the cutting, grazing and burning stop, the forest closes over the flow.

Three plants are confused with this one. Ling, Calluna vulgaris, is a genus of its own and carries its own honey and its own page; in English the unqualified word heather belongs to it, and in Spain its honey is sold as miel de calluna, miel de brecina or miel de biercol. St Dabeoc’s heath, Daboecia cantabrica, is a genus of its own in the same family. And on the Croatian coast vrijesak or vrisak can also mean winter savory, Satureja montana, a mint-family plant, so a jar printing that word has to be read for its plant before it is taken for heather. The strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, is a fourth case of a different kind: it shares the maquis, the bee and the same legal exemption, and in Greece the two are blended and sold as a declared two-plant honey.

Four uses of the plant are not honey, and three of them kill it. A briar pipe is turned from the lignotuber of Erica arborea, and digging it out takes the shrub with it; the shrublands were a source of charcoal; Erica scoparia is the broom heath in its own botanical name and in its French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese ones, and a Turkish chemist writing for a Muğla foundation laments that the plant goes mostly into brush brooms rather than honey. In the Cape a fourth use spares the plant: the flowers are cut for the flower trade.

Pairings:

One pairing recurs across the producing countries and each gives the same reason: matured, piquant cheese, intensity against intensity, with the honey’s bitterness doing the work. Italy’s national beekeepers’ union writes on its own Miele di Erica sheet that the honey can be paired with aged and piquant cheeses; Portuguese sellers put mel de urze against cured goat’s cheese and say the heather’s intensity cuts the goat’s acidity; the Spanish trade sends brezo to blue cheeses and intense desserts; Turkish sellers put püren balı on an autumn cheese board. That is the trade describing its own product.

Two countries independently report the honey reading as less sweet than its sugar content, which is why they eat it on its own: Italy’s beekeepers’ union says that tasted neat it does not bring on a quick feeling of fullness. Turkish sellers put it in tea and hot drinks by preference.

As an ingredient, Italy’s national honey observatory calls the tree heath honey very easy to use in milk-based sweets and says it suits tarts and biscuits equally well; a Trentino house suggests its Miele di Erica with chicken curry.

Health Uses:

The tradition that attaches to these plants belongs to the plant and not to the honey. In France an infusion of the flowering tops of Erica cinerea carries a recognised traditional use for promoting the elimination of water by the kidneys and as an adjuvant in benign urinary complaints, alongside the same use for ling. The pharmacy press that reports it adds that only the flower is used, that the use rests on traditional practice and practitioners’ observations, and that arbutin, the one mechanism named, is present only in small quantity even in the plant. The wider folk record is the family’s: the Ericaceae appear in folk medicine as a diuretic and an antiseptic and in the treatment of urinary infections.

The ancient record is short: a Hippocratic preparation for inflammation of the womb, Galen on the diaphoretic action of the flower and leaves, and a belief about snakebite that was claimed of many plants. Fuchs stated in 1542 that the plant was not used in apothecaries’ shops, and the story that the genus is named for breaking bladder stones comes from the Renaissance herbalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli rather than from the ancient world.

No traditional use of the honey itself, independent of the plant’s, was found at any tier in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek or Turkish.