Linden - Lime - Basswood Honey
The Story
Across Europe and northern Asia the linden was the tree a community
organised itself around. Not farmed for honey. German has a separate word for each of its jobs –
Dorflinde, the village linden; Gerichtslinde, the court linden, under which
judgements were handed down; Tanzlinde, the dance linden, trained so that a
floor could be built into its branches and the musicians could play up in
the tree.
It is the national tree of Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia, the sacred tree of the Baltic goddess Laima, and holy in Slavic folklore from the Proto-Slavic root lipa. The honey is what fell out of that relationship. Nobody planted a linden for its nectar, and to this day almost nobody grows it as a honey crop: the world’s linden honey comes off village trees, street trees, woodlots and wild forest.
It is known by three names in English and they are not marketing variants. In North America the tree is basswood, in Europe and increasingly on Canadian labels it is linden, and in Britain it is lime – which has nothing whatever to do with the citrus fruit.
What is in the jar is consistent enough to be recognisable anywhere. It is pale, often water-white, with a greenish cast when very fresh, and it does not behave the way a pale honey should. Colour predicts strength in honey and linden is the documented exception: the aroma is loud, cool and medicinal, and the words tasters reach for – menthol, mint, camphor, balsamic, pharmacy – recur across every producing country and every language in which the honey is sold.
The bloom lasts two to three weeks and cannot be extended. Half a continent named a month after it.
Characteristics
Water-white to pale amber, faintly green when very fresh and settling to a clear yellow-amber, with an aroma out of all proportion to that colour: cool, green and medicinal, menthol and camphor over hay. On the palate it is medium-sweet rather than cloying, low in acidity, faintly bitter, slightly astringent, and long, with a cooling note that arrives late and holds.
Crystallization is medium to fast, into a fine to medium grain. In northeast China, where the honey sets below about 14 degrees C into a smooth white mass with the look of soft lard, the crystallized form is not a defect to be managed but the product itself: it is sold as snow honey and as white honey, and a Heilongjiang producer is credited with turning the market around in 1991 by naming and standardising it rather than fighting it.
The character holds across the genus more than it varies within it, which is why this honey travels under one identity from France to Hokkaido. The exception worth knowing is silver lime, Tilia tomentosa, which Romanian sources single out as giving the most perfumed linden honey of all.
Click to Display — The Details: botanical origin, sensory profile, pairings, health and what gives it its character
Nectar Contributors:
- Primary: Small-leaved lime, winter linden (Tilia cordata)
- Primary: Large-leaved lime, summer linden (Tilia platyphyllos)
- Primary: American basswood (Tilia americana)
- Primary: Amur linden, purple linden (ziduan) (Tilia amurensis)
- Secondary: Manchurian linden (kangduan) (Tilia mandshurica)
- Secondary: Japanese linden (shinanoki) (Tilia japonica)
- Secondary: Silver lime (Tilia tomentosa)
- Secondary: Caucasian lime (ihlamur, tsatskhvi) (Tilia begoniifolia, syn. Tilia rubra subsp. caucasica)
- Supporting: Common lime (Tilia x europaea)
Bee Species:
Apis mellifera carries the commercial crop everywhere the honey is made. What is unusual about linden is that two dark-bee populations are protected in part because of it.
In Bashkortostan the Burzyan bee, a population of the dark forest bee Apis mellifera mellifera, is described by Russian sources as evolutionarily set to work the linden flow, and it is the object of the only state reserve in the world created to protect a wild bee population together with the craft of keeping it. In northeast China the black bee of Raohe holds its own reserve, established in 1980 and raised in part to national status in 1997; Chinese accounts credit it with working at temperatures around 8 degrees C and crossing ridges to reach the linden stands.
Both are forest bees on a forest tree, and both are protected where that forest and its flow survive.
Color:
Water-white to pale amber, with a green cast when very fresh, deepening to a clear yellow-amber with time
Flavor Profile:
Cool and medicinal over a medium sweetness – menthol, mint and camphor, with low acidity, a light bitterness and a long astringent finish
Tasting Notes:
The intensity of both aroma and taste is stronger than the colour would indicate, and this is the honey’s signature: the usual rule that darker means stronger is broken here.
The vocabulary converges to a remarkable degree across languages. European tasting sheets give woody, pharmacy, fresh, mint, balsamic, menthol and camphor. Canadian and Quebec producers reach for menthol and mint in French and English alike. Chinese sellers describe a mint-like coolness over a dense floral scent; Japanese producers describe a herbal cool that runs up the nose, and one of them reaches instead for cinnamon. Romanian buyers call it simply the fullest and most aromatic honey their country makes.
Under the top notes it is only medium-sweet, with low acidity and often a light bitterness. It is slightly astringent and the aftertaste is persistent. Beyond the menthol there are hay, spice-thyme, geranium and phenolic notes, each of which has been traced to a specific compound.
Aroma:
Loud, green and pharmaceutical – menthol and balsam over hay, with a geranium note and a fresh mint lift
Defining Compounds:
Linden is one of the few honeys whose aroma has been resolved into named compounds, which is a large part of why its description is so consistent from one country to the next. Three studies established it.
Tsuneya and colleagues, working in 1974 from an ether extract of 116 kilograms of lime tree honey, identified 8-p-menthene-1,2-diol as its major volatile compound. Blank and colleagues in 1989 proposed two further indicators of the type: linden ether, 3,9-epoxy-1,4(8)-p-menthadiene, and cis-rose oxide.
The fullest account is Guyot, Bouseta, Scheirman and Collin, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 1998. Separating about four hundred volatile compounds by gas chromatography across 110 honeys, they found lime tree honey marked by two groups. The first is shikimate-pathway derivatives: an ethylmethylphenol isomer above 31 parts per billion, 4-tert-butylphenol, estragole above 51, and p-methylacetophenone. The second is high concentrations of monoterpene-derived compounds – menthol, thymol, 8-p-menthene-1,2-diol and carvacrol above 76 parts per billion – together with methyl(1-methylethenyl)benzene.
The sniffing results connect the chemistry to what is tasted. The phenol derivatives were detected with a phenolic note, p-methylacetophenone came through as hay, menthol as mentholated, and estragole – the allyl isomer of anethole, isolated in lime honey by Tsuneya – as anise and fennel. Menthol was evidenced in lime tree honey for the first time in this work, and the authors suspect it of contributing the characteristic mentholated aroma, while noting that it can also turn up in honeys from mint plants.
This is also why the colour misleads. The aromatic load sits in volatile compounds rather than in the pigments that make a honey dark, so a water-white linden carries more flavour than a darker honey beside it.
Forage Origin: 
Linden honey is made from the nectar of trees in the genus Tilia, family Malvaceae, formerly placed in a family of its own, the Tiliaceae. The genus runs to roughly thirty species right around the northern temperate zone, and a large number of them are worked for honey. This is why the honey is produced on three continents and why it is the same honey in each.
In Europe the honey trees are the small-leaved lime, Tilia cordata, and the large-leaved lime, Tilia platyphyllos – the German winter and summer linden – together with their hybrid the common lime, Tilia x europaea, and in the Balkans the silver lime, Tilia tomentosa. North America has a single native, Tilia americana, the northernmost species of the genus, the tree that the Forest Service itself calls the bee-tree. East Asia supplies the rest: in northeast China the purple linden Tilia amurensis and the Manchurian linden Tilia mandshurica, and in northern Japan the endemic Tilia japonica.
The bloom order is a commercial fact rather than a botanical footnote. In Germany the summer linden flowers from mid-to-late June and the winter linden from early July; in northeast China the purple linden opens in early July and the Manchurian linden about ten days later, and the two together give an overlapping window of roughly twenty days that is the whole Chinese season.
THE TREE NAMED FOR ITS ROPE. Four peoples on three continents named this tree for the same thing, and none of them named it for honey. English basswood is a worn-down form of bastwood, from the tough fibrous inner bark. German Linde is traced to a north-Germanic root meaning to bind, after the same bark used for binding work. Japanese shinanoki takes its shina from the Ainu word for tying; the Ainu name for the tree, ni-pes-ni, means the tree that rope material comes from. Latvian liepa descends from a root meaning to stick or adhere. The honey came second everywhere. Before it was a honey tree this was the tree you made cord, netting, matting and shoes from, and the wood – soft, pale and even-grained – is still the carver’s standard timber, the material of Riemenschneider’s limewood altars and of the panels that Russian icons are painted on.
One naming trap is worth carrying. In Japan the honey is sold as bodaiju, Bodhi-tree honey, but the true Bodhi tree is Ficus religiosa, a fig and no relation; Japanese sellers routinely flag the confusion themselves. And in Britain the tree is the lime, which is not the citrus.
Pairings:
The aroma that makes this honey worth buying is volatile, which sets the rule: warm it, do not cook it.
Its natural partner is a herbal or mint tea, where the heat of the cup lifts the cool note rather than driving it off – and in the linden-tea countries, a cup of linden-flower tea sweetened with linden honey is the same flower twice. The legacy note on this honey pairs it with lemon sherbet, and the logic holds: cold, sharp and citrus flatters the menthol. It stands up to soft-rinded and nutty cheeses, and it is assertive enough to be worth eating from the spoon.
Keep it out of long baking, where the volatiles that carry its identity are simply lost.
Health Uses:
Linden honey carries an unusually consistent body of folk use, and it is folk use rather than clinical fact.
It has long been taken for colds and fevers as a diaphoretic – a drink to encourage sweating – and as a general fortifying agent. Across Eastern Europe and Russia it is the household honey for sore throat, rhinitis and laryngitis, usually stirred into tea, and it is combined with lemon against a cold that is coming on. It has also been applied externally to sores, eczema and burns. In Romania and Turkey the tradition attaches to the flower first: linden-flower tea is the evening calming drink, and the honey is understood to carry the same quality.
These are traditional and household uses, recorded as such. None of them is a therapeutic claim.
Origin Story
The linden’s place in European life is older than any record of its honey, and it explains why the honey exists in the pattern it does.
In Germanic religion the tree was sacred to Freya and Frigg. Courts were held beneath it: the Teutons heard cases unter den Linden in the belief that the truth would come out there, and the practice ran on through the Holy Roman Empire in the Gerichtslinde, the court linden, with its harder relatives the Prangerlinde, the pillory linden, and the Streitlinde. The Bavarian state forestry institute records the reasoning in a phrase worth keeping: about the linden everything is soft and mild, like its wood and its honey. The last execution at the Gottingen court linden took place in 1859. Something over ten centuries-old court lindens still stand.
The dance lindens are the strangest survival. These are trees trained over generations so that a floor could be built into the lower branches on stone columns, with the village dancing on the platform and the musicians playing from a house set among the boughs. Five three-tier examples remain – at Limmersdorf, Peesten and Langenstadt in Franconia, and Sachsendorf and Effelder in southern Thuringia – and Limmersdorf has held its Lindenkirchweih without interruption since at least 1729. Around fifty church lindens and sixty dance lindens survive in Germany, all several centuries old. Goethe put the scene in Faust; Schubert set Der Lindenbaum.
In the Slavic and Baltic world the tree is holy rather than judicial. Lipa is the national symbol of Slovenia, the national tree of Czechia and Slovakia, and the emblem of the Sorbs of Lusatia. Leipzig takes its name from the Sorbian lipsk, the linden place, and over 850 German towns are named for the tree. In Baltic mythology the lime is the tree of Laima, goddess of fate, who made her decisions from it in the form of a cuckoo, and Lithuanian women prayed and left offerings beneath lime trees and spoke to them as to people.
The oldest surviving forms of European beekeeping are both linden practices, at opposite ends of the continent. Medieval Germany had Zeidlerei, forest beekeeping in hollowed living trees. Bashkortostan still has bortnichestvo, which Slow Food calls the only such practice surviving in Europe: bees kept in hollows cut high in living pines and worked on the linden flow, the hive trees inherited down families and each marked with a tamga, the family sign. The count of these hives is a history in itself – 908 in 1927, about 180 by the 1990s, about 400 by 2004, held now inside the Shulgan-Tash reserve.
The classical world knew the tree too. Ovid gave it the ending of Baucis and Philemon, the poor Phrygian couple who fed two gods unknowingly and asked, as their reward, never to be parted – and were granted eternity together as a linden and an oak.
Cultural Context
Half of Europe named a month after this tree’s flowering. Polish lipiec and Ukrainian lypen are July; Croatian lipanj and Slovak lipen are June; Lithuanian liepa is July and is simply the word for the tree; Belarusian lipien and the archaic Russian lipets are the same naming.
It reaches the coinage as well as the calendar. The lipa was the subunit of the Croatian kuna until the country adopted the euro, and lipa was proposed as the name of Slovenia’s currency in 1990 before tolar was chosen instead.
Where the flower is drunk, the honey is eaten with it. Linden-flower tea is a household staple across Romania, France, Turkey and much of central Europe – ceai de tei, tilleul, ihlamur – taken in the evening as a calming drink, and in those countries the honey of the same flower is its natural partner. This is the practical reason linden honey outsells acacia in Romanian homes even though acacia leads the export trade, and it is why Romanian and Turkish buyers meet the honey already knowing what the flower tastes like.
The pilgrimage church of Swieta Lipka in Poland is named Holy Linden. Rublev’s Trinity, and his Saviour, are painted on linden panels.
Harvest & Forage
Everything about producing this honey follows from the length of the bloom. A linden flowers for two to three weeks and no management extends it. In a cool year it can fail outright, and beekeepers who work linden do not get a crop every season.
Within the window the flow is famously heavy and famously conditional. Warm, humid weather draws the strongest secretion; the legacy record of this honey describes nectar standing on the flowers like morning dew during a strong flow. The Chinese measurements are the most precise available anywhere: in Changbai mixed forest a single Tilia amurensis flower opens for six to eight days and secretes for five, yielding 8.58 milligrams; the nectar averages 37.7 percent sugar and peaks at midday; a tree of 40 centimetres diameter carries some 180,000 flowers and about 1.56 kilograms of nectar; and a hectare of linden yields between 79 and 147 kilograms.
Because the tree is not a crop, hives must be brought to it. Romanian beekeepers move their apiaries to the linden massifs of Tulcea, Vaslui and Moldova for the three weeks of June bloom; Chinese and Russian beekeepers work the forest ranges; North American producers place a yard within flight of a stand and take the crop off the moment the trees finish, before the summer flow blends into it.
Purity is a matter of timing rather than of testing, because the testing does not settle it. Whether a honey counts as unifloral is decided by a pollen count, and the figure that count must beat is set per plant rather than once for all honey: bees do not carry pollen home in proportion to the nectar they take, so chestnut must exceed 86 percent chestnut pollen and eucalyptus 83, while the under-represented types clear at far less. Linden sits at that lower end. The International Honey Commission lists Tilia among the pollen types that can be under-represented: honeys accepted as unifloral linden have been found carrying anywhere from 1 to 56 percent linden pollen, so a low count does not disqualify the honey, and the Commission directs that sensory and physical measurements be read alongside the count rather than the count alone. Bulgaria, the only country found to legislate a figure for linden, sets thirty percent – and a 2025 study of the Bulgarian market found 39 percent of samples sold as monofloral linden did not meet it.
Beekeeping Context
There is no linden honey industry in the sense that there is a canola or a clover industry, because there are no linden plantations. The world’s supply comes off three kinds of stand: wild forest, principally in the Russian Urals, the Chinese northeast and the Carpathians; village and street trees planted for shade, ceremony or civic ornament across Europe and North America; and farm woodlots.
This shapes who produces it. Linden honey is overwhelmingly the work of small and medium beekeepers moving hives short distances to a known stand for a known fortnight, and it is priced accordingly: scarce, seasonal, and usually sold direct or through specialist retail rather than through supermarkets. The two exceptions are at the extremes – China, where the northeastern crop is organised at industrial scale around a geographical indication and a standardised crystallized product, and Romania, where linden is a substantial share of a national industry holding some two million hives.
The oldest method is still practised. In Bashkortostan the bortnik cuts a cavity high in a living pine, and the honey comes out in irregular frameless comb which cannot be cleanly separated from the rest of the hive’s contents – so it is sold as comb and honey together, cloudy and full of wax rather than clear amber.
Source Regions
- Russia, Bashkortostan, the Urals and European Russia - Tilia spp.: Linden honey (lipovy myod): The one linden-honey culture with its own word for the flow. Russian calls the linden harvest lipets, and the Shulgan-Tash reserve still announces its season by saying the republic’s main honey plant has bloomed and the lipets is awaited. Bashkortostan practises bortnichestvo, wild-hive beekeeping in hollows cut high in living pines and worked on the linden flow by the Burzyan dark forest bee, protected inside a state biosphere reserve created in 1958. The pine houses the bees and the linden feeds them. The Russian Geographical Society quotes the figure that Bashkortostan holds a third of the world’s and half of Russia’s linden reserves. Linden forest is only about 0.4 percent of Russia’s forest area, concentrated in the Urals, which is why the honey is prized rather than common.
- China, Heilongjiang and Jilin, the Changbai, Wanda and Khingan ranges - Tilia spp.: Linden honey (duanshu mi): A producer on a scale no older account of this honey records, and absent from all of them. Chinese trade ranks duanshu mi with southern lychee honey as the two famous honeys of north and south. It sets below about 14 degrees C into a fine white mass and is sold on that state, as snow honey and white honey – a market a Heilongjiang producer is credited with creating in 1991 by standardising the crystallized form rather than fighting it. Hulin, styled the home of Chinese linden honey, holds a geographical indication covering 355,000 hectares and about 1,200 tonnes. The old northeastern names for the tree are fragrant-flower tree, white-honey tree and bee tree – a name that arose here quite independently of the same name in North America.
- Romania, Tulcea, Vaslui and the Moldavian hills - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: The country where linden honey is what people actually eat. It is about 15 percent of national production behind polyfloral and acacia, but where acacia leads the export trade, linden leads domestic daily consumption – because Romanians drink ceai de tei, linden-flower tea, and pair the honey with the tea of the same flower. Romania holds around two million hives, second in the European Union and more than a tenth of its total, and its 2015 and 2018 crops of 35,000 tonnes were the largest in the Union in those years. Beekeepers move apiaries to the linden massifs for the three-week June bloom.
- Moldova, the Codri forests of the centre - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: A linden honey inside a protected indication that tells beekeepers how crowded they are allowed to be. Miere din Codrii Moldovei was registered in 2020 and admits monofloral linden among its permitted types, and its specification sets a stocking rate per hectare of forage: 18 to 25 colonies a hectare on acacia, but only 8 to 12 on lime. It also fixes when the crop may be taken, once a third of the combs are capped and the water is down to 18 to 20 percent. Of the three limes the silver is the heaviest yielder here at 950 to 1,200 kg of nectar a hectare. Moldova makes around 5,000 tonnes of honey in a normal year and exports most of it, more than 4,000 tonnes of that into the European Union. The crop is fragile: late frosts, then dry wind during the lime flow, cut the 2025 linden harvest by more than 80 percent, and the country’s specialist honeys came in at 30 percent of a good year.
- Poland, nationwide - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: Lipiec is July and lipa is the linden, one of the several languages that named the month for this bloom. Poles know not to leave a car parked under one in flower. Polish buyers rate linden honey above acacia, which is the reverse of the export markets to the south, and the pilgrimage shrine of Swieta Lipka – Holy Linden – carries the tree in its name.
- Ukraine and Belarus, the forest-steppe and Polesia - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: Lypen in Ukrainian and lipien in Belarusian are July, named for this bloom. Ukraine is among the larger producers in the region and a significant exporter into the European Union.
- Germany, Austria and Switzerland, village and church stands and mixed woodland - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: Here the honey comes off trees planted for every purpose except honey. German keeps a separate word for each – Dorflinde, Gerichtslinde, Tanzlinde, Kirchlinde – and about fifty church lindens and sixty dance lindens survive, all several centuries old, five of them still carrying a dance floor built into the branches. Medieval German forest beekeeping, Zeidlerei, was built on this tree. Tilia cordata was named German Tree of the Year in 2016, Tilia platyphyllos in 1991.
- Bulgaria, the North Central region above all - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: The only country found to legislate a pollen threshold for linden honey, at 30 percent. A 2025 study of eighteen samples across six regions found the North Central region, the richest in linden forest, gave both the highest linden pollen counts, at 75 to 78 percent, and the highest sensory scores – and that 39 percent of honey sold on the Bulgarian market as monofloral linden did not meet the national threshold.
- Slovenia, nationwide - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: The tree is the national symbol. The Rut linden, beside the church in the mountain hamlet of Rut above the Baska Grapa valley, is said to be more than 850 years old with a girth of some 26 feet. Lipa was proposed as the name of the Slovenian currency in 1990 before tolar was chosen.
- Croatia, Serbia and the western Balkans, the Sava and Danube basins - Tilia tomentosa: Linden honey: Croatian lipanj is June, named for the bloom, and the lipa was the subunit of the Croatian kuna until the euro – a country that put the linden on its coins. The characteristic tree of the region is the silver lime, Tilia tomentosa, which Romanian sources single out as giving the most perfumed linden honey of all.
- Turkey, the Yenice district of Karabuk, with wider production in the Black Sea and Marmara forests - Tilia spp.: Linden honey (Yenice Ihlamur Bali): A linden honey carrying a European protected designation of origin, granted on a specification that sets no minimum for linden pollen. Yenice Ihlamur Bali entered the register in November 2025 as Turkey’s 43rd protected product and its second honey. The specification calls it an under-represented unifloral honey with low pollen representation, then defines it by what grows alongside: Tilia pollen must be present together with pollen from at least two of seven named plants – elder, traveller’s joy, Christ’s thorn, heather, and the rose-family Rubus, Crataegus and Rosa – and the overall profile must sit within a list of 86 taxa native to the district. Producers put the linden share of the pollen at about 8 percent and never below 5. A doctoral survey of 54 Yenice honeys from 13 sites found linden the dominant pollen in 8 of them and absent from 7. The district holds Turkey’s largest unbroken block of forest and turns out 20 to 25 tonnes a year. The trees face a competing harvest: branches are cut whole for the flower itself, which Turks drink as ihlamur.
- Georgia, Adjara, with linden honey made across Imereti and Samegrelo as well - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: The country where the linden supplies the hive as well as the crop. Linden is one of the five honeys Georgia names, alongside acacia, chestnut, alpine and blossom, and Georgian sellers put the darker version down to western Georgia, where the linden bloom overlaps the chestnut. The tree’s other job here is structural. A jara is a Georgian log hive: a section of trunk split lengthwise, hollowed, and hoisted high into a tree or onto a cliff face to keep bears off it. In the Adjaran valleys the rope that hauled it up was linden too, plaited from the bark and worked with a windlass and a thinner second line; in the Machakhela valley it was called chapani. The Jara Beekeepers Association’s written standard calls for a light, weather-resistant timber – linden or Oriental spruce – 80 to 120 cm long, with no nail anywhere in it and no wax foundation inside, so the colony builds its own comb. A board splits the hive: the front comb belongs to the bees and the beekeeper never touches it, and only the back is taken, once a year. What comes out is polyfloral rather than linden, and Georgia makes 2 to 3 tonnes of it. The National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation gave the practice monument status in January 2021, and two dozen jara beekeepers hold organic certification, nearly all of them in Adjara.
- Czechia and Slovakia, Bohemia, Moravia and the Slovak uplands - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: The lipa is the national tree of both countries, and Slovak lipen is June. The linden is the shared civic emblem of the Czech and Slovak lands, which is why it turns up on everything from state symbols to village greens.
- Hungary, the Zselic, the Mecsek and the southern Transdanubian hills - Tilia cordata: Linden honey (harsmez): Here the lime is worked to carry the bees between two bigger flows. Hungarian beekeeping runs on acacia, and the lime’s job is the dearth between the acacia and the sunflower, which is why apiaries travel to it – the three species together are only about 1 percent of Hungarian forest, so harsmez is a moved crop rather than a local one. Small-leaved lime is the one that yields, and most of its nectar is secreted between midnight and six in the morning, so the bees work it early. The lime Hungarian foresters recommend planting for bees, though, is the silver, and the reason is that its flowers are covered in star-shaped hairs that make them allergenic and useless as tea. Nobody mutilates or fells a silver lime for its blossom, which foresters report seeing done to the other two.
- Lithuania and Latvia, nationwide - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: Liepa is both the tree and the month of July in Lithuanian, and Latvian keeps liepu menesis, the lindens’ month. In Baltic mythology the lime is the sacred tree of Laima, the goddess of fate, who made her decisions from it in the form of a cuckoo; Lithuanian women prayed and made offerings beneath lime trees and spoke to them as they would to people.
- France, Picardy and the forests of the Hauts-de-France, with lime honey also taken in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and around Paris - Tilia cordata: Linden honey (Miel de tilleul): The newest protected linden honey in Europe, and the one that waited longest for it. Miel de tilleul de Picardie was entered as a protected geographical indication in November 2025, a quarter of a century after its producers began the case in 2000, and it is the first honey of any kind from the Hauts-de-France to hold one. Small-leaved lime grows wild in the Picardy forests at a concentration found nowhere else in France – 7,600 hectares, the eighth commonest species in the region – and it gives over 500 kg of nectar a hectare against about 200 for the large-leaved lime. This honey is pale where most linden honey is darker, because the beekeepers place their hives to avoid other trees in flower and take the crop off nectar rather than honeydew. It was already being sold in 1770, listed in the Dictionnaire portatif du commerce as miel jaune de Picardie, and the tree named the places around it: Chantilly is campus tiliae, the field of limes. The taste was long the obstacle. Twenty years ago growers could not sell it and blended it into milder honeys to soften it; the pronounced menthol note they were hiding is now the thing the label protects. Lime has since passed rapeseed as the first flow of the year in both the Hauts-de-France and the Ile-de-France.
- United Kingdom, London and the English lowlands - Tilia spp.: Lime honey: The country whose name for the tree gives this honey its third English name, and where the crop is largely urban. London’s lime avenues are reported to be a Victorian street planting, and the capital’s summer flow still comes off them: a letter to Nature from a London beekeeper and perfumery chemist put the bulk of the city’s honey flow, particularly in the parks, down to the limes and the privet hedges. The speed is the same as everywhere else – a Highgate beekeeper recorded a hive drawing and filling an entire super in the ten days after the local limes opened – and a Cambridgeshire apiary describes the result as light and runny, with a mint note that arrives a second or two after the sweetness. Small-leaved lime is native to Britain and large-leaved lime is native but rare; the street tree is usually the hybrid common lime. British opinion on the tree’s worth has long been split, and the split is on the record: Hooper reported seeing no lime honey since the 1930s despite keeping hives near substantial avenues, while Howes thought lime accounted for a sizeable share of the honey not made from clover, particularly near towns.
- South Korea, Gangwon and the central mountains - Tilia spp.: Linden honey: The country raising linden in a laboratory to feed its bees. Korea keeps bees at the highest density in the world, put at about 18.5 colonies to the square kilometre, while the area of forest that can feed them has fallen to roughly a third of what it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Linden is part of the state’s answer to that. The Forest Service rates it among the species yielding more than twice the honey per hectare of the black locust Korean beekeeping has leaned on, and the two native limes flower in succession through June and July, which widens the harvest window. The National Institute of Forest Science has patented a tissue-culture method that raises Tilia mandshurica plants from the terminal bud with better than 90 percent success, so the tree can now be planted at scale. Korean sellers call the honey the emperor of honeys and warn that the tree crops heavily only in some years.
- Japan, Hokkaido and northern Tohoku - Tilia spp.: Linden honey (bodaiju): Japan’s linden honey is a northern-islands crop, because the tree will not take the heat further south. Shinanoki is a Japanese endemic and Hokkaido’s largest honey crop by volume, rated a very important major nectar source by the Japan Beekeeping Association and called akashina by beekeepers. It flowers for about ten days from late July. It is sold as bodaiju, Bodhi-tree honey, a name its own sellers flag as a confusion – the true Bodhi tree is an unrelated fig. The name shina comes from the Ainu word for binding, and the Ainu called the tree ni-pes-ni, the tree rope comes from.
- United States, the upper Midwest, the Great Lakes, the Northeast and the Appalachians - Tilia americana: Basswood honey: Basswood country, and the place whose name for the tree records its bast. The American linden is the northernmost species of the genus and the Forest Service calls it the bee-tree outright. Minnesota’s Ames Farm has taken the state fair blue ribbon for single-source basswood honey three times.
- Canada, southern Ontario and southern Quebec - Tilia americana: Basswood honey (Miel de tilleul): Bottled as basswood in English and miel de tilleul in French, from a range running from New Brunswick through Quebec and Ontario to the southeast corner of Manitoba. Documented in full on its own page.
- Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium, Estonia and Kazakhstan - Tilia spp.: Linden honey (miele di tiglio, miel de tilo, lindehoning, parnamesi, lipovy myod): produced and sold in all of these under the local name; in Kazakhstan the trade language is Russian.
Translations
- Lipovyi med (Russian) – and lipets, a separate Russian word for the linden flow itself, still used by the Bashkir reserve to announce the season
- Duanshu mi (Chinese) – also xuemi, snow honey, and baimi, white honey, both trade names for the crystallized state
- Bodaiju or shina hachimitsu (Japanese) – sold as Bodhi-tree honey, though the true Bodhi tree is unrelated
- Lindenhonig (German)
- Miod lipowy (Polish)
- Miere de tei (Romanian)
- Lypenovyi med (Ukrainian)
- Lipov med (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Czech)
- Liepu medus (Lithuanian) and liepzieds (Latvian)
- Miel de tilleul (French), miele di tiglio (Italian), miel de tilo (Spanish)
- Harsmez (Hungarian), ihlamur bali (Turkish), pinamu kkul (Korean)
Festivals and Fairs
- Lindenkirchweih – Limmersdorf, Upper Franconia, Germany (late August): The village dances on a wooden floor built into the branches of its dance linden, with the band playing from a house set among the boughs. Recorded without interruption since at least 1729, and the best-known survival of a tradition that once ran across Franconia and Thuringia.
Certifications
Yenice Ihlamur Bali PDO – Registered by the European Union in November 2025 for the Yenice district of Karabuk, Turkey, and the only protected designation this site has found for a linden honey. It protects the name, the two linden species and the district, and it defines the honey by its whole pollen spectrum rather than by a linden percentage.
Yenice Linden Honey, Ark of Taste – Listed in Slow Food’s catalogue of foods at risk of disappearing. The entry records beekeeping in the district back to the 18th century and names the threat: whole branches cut from the trees to harvest the linden flower itself.