Orange Blossom Honey

Botanical Name: Citrus trees (Citrus spp.)

Botanical Family: Rutaceae

Bee Species:

Orange blossom honey is a Western honey bee honey. Every producing country whose sources name a bee names Apis mellifera or one of its local races.

The one documented exception is in China, where the Asian hive bee, Apis cerana, also takes a citrus crop. The national agricultural encyclopaedia puts a colony of it at about 10 kilograms in one bloom, against about 20 for a colony of the Italian race of the Western bee.

Color:

Very pale: almost colourless to straw yellow when liquid, about 15 mm Pfund (USDA extra white); white to pale beige, sometimes pearly, once set

Flavor Profile:

Sweet, from medium to very sweet depending on the register; the registers differ on its acidity and on the length of its finish

Tasting Notes:

The registers that describe this honey find the nose floral and fresh, with a fresh-fruit note, and differ on its strength: medium on the international sheet, Italy’s national sheet and the honey observatory’s, intense for Italy’s beekeepers’ federation, very intense on the Málaga regulator’s sheet. The International Honey Commission’s sheet gives the aroma in the mouth as fresh, of anise, and the Croatian designation’s 2023 specification records the same anise for its satsuma honey. Italy’s beekeepers’ federation adds honeysuckle, hawthorn and yellow melon.

On sweetness the registers split. The international sheet says medium; Italy’s national sheet says normally to very sweet, and the Málaga designation very sweet; the Italian federation says normally sweet.

On acidity three bodies differ. The Granada designation’s regulator calls the flavour very persistent and acidic. The Italian federation finds a light acidity. The Corsican appellation’s specification gives its spring honey, the range that takes the clementine orchards, no particular acidity or a slight one.

The finish is short to medium on the international and Croatian rows and fairly persistent on Italy’s national sheet.

Aroma:

Floral and fresh, of citrus blossom, with fresh-fruit and anise notes; honeysuckle, hawthorn and yellow melon in the Italian beekeepers’ federation’s description

Defining Compounds:

Methyl anthranilate is a typical component of citrus honey, proposed as its chemical marker since the 1930s, and it fails as a test of purity. In a 2008 Italian study of 46 citrus honeys its levels in the honeys judged single-flower by tasting, pollen, colour and conductivity largely overlapped with the rest, and the minimum some European laboratories apply, the figure Germany’s food code also sets, would have rejected 17 of the 28 honeys the authors judged genuine by every other test. The compound also fades as a honey ages, earlier studies report.

Hesperetin has held up better. A 1993 Spanish study found this flavonoid in every citrus honey tested and absent from a long list of other honeys, and traced it to hesperidin, the main flavonoid of orange nectar, which the bees’ own enzymes, the authors propose, split into hesperetin. A 2001 survey of 52 European single-flower honeys confirmed it as the citrus marker. Telling one citrus from another takes a research laboratory: a 2011 Spanish model correctly classed 98 per cent of the lemon and orange honeys it was built on, and 97 per cent on cross-validation, using 37 aroma compounds with diastase, conductivity and colour readings.

The scent itself is linalool and its relatives: linalool oxides, the lilac aldehydes and methyl anthranilate recur across laboratories as citrus honey’s floral markers. The honey keeps the flower’s ratio between linalool’s two mirror-image forms, and that ratio holds through storage and packing while the amounts vary, which a 2014 study proposes as a check of authenticity.

Satsuma honey adds compounds of its own. A 2016 Croatian study traced three markers from the satsuma nectar into the jar, 1H-indole, 1,3-dihydro-2H-indol-2-one and phenylacetonitrile, none of them reported in earlier studies of other citrus honeys, and the Croatian designation writes them into its specification as marks of a satsuma origin.

Two European allowances apply to this honey: a higher sucrose ceiling and a lower enzyme floor. Citrus honey may hold up to 10 grams of sucrose in 100 grams, where 5 applies to honey in general, though only 2 samples in the international reference data passed 5: a reading between 5 and 10 is lawful. The EU honey directive also names citrus honeys as its example of a honey low in natural enzymes, accepting a diastase of 3 on the Schade scale, where 8 applies to other honeys, if HMF is at most 15 mg/kg. A 2018 review reports an earlier study in which 7 of 61 fresh citrus honeys, 11.5 per cent, already held more than 10 mg/kg of HMF, so that a little processing, blending or storage could take them past the 15 the allowance permits.

Forage Origin:

The bees take nectar from the flowers of citrus trees, the genus Citrus in the rue family, Rutaceae, native from the Himalaya to southern Japan and the south-west Pacific. Nearly every cultivated citrus is a hybrid of three wild ancestors, the citron, the pummelo and the mandarin. The same trees are grown for fresh fruit and juice, for sour orange marmalade, for orange-flower water, and for perfume oils, neroli from the flowers and bergamot oil from the rind.

The orchards are mixed, and so is the honey. Sweet orange is the main source almost everywhere; satsuma, mandarin, lemon, clementine, bergamot, pomelo, grapefruit, kumquat, citron and bitter orange each reach a jar under their own name somewhere, and most jars carry several. Italy’s beekeepers’ federation writes that the citrus honeys form a family of rather similar products, whose differences come more often from the accompanying flora or the production methods than from the citrus the bees worked. The Málaga designation’s regulator names that flora: clover, wall rocket and dandelion-type daisies between the trees, olive and rockrose at the orchard edges. In English the honey is sold as orange blossom honey or as citrus honey, and in New Zealand the Gisborne producers sell it as citrus honey alone. Japan’s satsuma honey has its own page, Japan Mikan Honey.

A citrus honey carries little citrus pollen. The flower starts its nectar early: China’s agricultural encyclopaedia records the nectary secreting three to five days before the petals open. Many varieties shed little pollen: Spain’s dominant Navel oranges were selected for pollen sterility so that the fruit would be seedless, and Croatia’s satsuma has sterile anthers, a property of those varieties, since South Africa’s national botanical institute finds most citrus varieties fertile. And the bees come for the nectar, on 94 per cent of visits across three seasons in a Brazilian sweet-orange orchard. In the international reference set citrus pollen averaged 18.6 per cent, most samples falling between 2 and 42, and the authors of a Spanish study write that a honey of undisputed citrus character can be unfairly rejected on the microscope alone.

Citrus nectar also carries caffeine, at doses below the bees’ bitter-taste threshold. In a 2013 study honey bees rewarded with it were three times as likely to remember a learned floral scent, and the authors connect that memory to the bees’ fidelity to the bloom.

Three other honeys carry citrus names. An Ethiopian seller’s orange honey from the Borana Zone is harvested, in its words, from wild orange blossoms, and wild orange is an English name for Strychnos innocua, a tree of another plant family that grows in Ethiopia. In Britain lime blossom honey is one of the country’s own honeys, and Britain’s lime tree is Tilia. And orange jessamine, Murraya paniculata, is a citrus relative in the same family whose honey, in the words of the Valencia botanic garden’s citrus monograph, has a distinctive and highly esteemed taste.

The jar to read closely is the flavoured one. Codex Alimentarius, the international food standard, requires anything sold as honey to be honey alone, and orange-blossom-water confections, citrus-infused honeys and honey preserves share the shelf under similar names; in Japan a Kyoto specialist’s yuzu jar holds yuzu peel and juice in honey. A buyer tells them apart by the ingredient line.

Pairings:

Italy’s national honey observatory says only that this honey goes with almost every sweet food. Italy’s beekeepers’ union proposes it, conditionally, for lighter bloomy-rind cheeses. The Málaga beekeepers’ association lists herbal infusions, unripened dairy such as yoghurt and fresh cheese, white meat and chicken, fried sweets, desserts made with oil or butter, and ice cream. In a 2017 consumer trial pairing Andalusian goat cheeses with three honeys, orange blossom honey sat in the preferred group on fresh, semi-cured and oil-cured cheese alike, in the same group as eucalyptus, the top scorer.

As an ingredient it goes on at the end. In the Málaga association’s recipe for fritters the honey is drizzled over the fritters once they are fried and plated. A French meadery also makes a sparkling mead from it.

Health Uses:

An Iranian seller describes this honey taken with a tisane of the same blossom for calm and sleep, and the reputation belongs to the blossom too: in Tunisia, the United Nations industrial development agency records, orange-flower water from the Cap Bon bitter-orange harvest is a traditional remedy for sleeplessness.