Strawberry Tree Honey

Bee Species:

Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, makes the honey everywhere it is produced. Two of its protected designations name the bee: Corsica’s requires the island’s own ecotype, a locally adapted strain, of Apis mellifera mellifera and forbids bringing in other stock, and Morocco’s names two races, Apis mellifera intermissa and one the order calls Apis Mellifera Major.

A 2005 study of the tree in the Massif des Maures, citing earlier fieldwork there, reports honey bees collecting the strawberry tree’s nectar and not its pollen, and its flowers as the only source of pollen and nectar for buff-tailed bumblebees in those hills in winter.

Color:

Amber when liquid; hazel to brown with grey-green tones when crystallised

Flavor Profile:

Bitter and little sweet, acidic and astringent

Tasting Notes:

Italy’s descriptive sheet gives the taste as poco dolce (not very sweet), at least decidedly bitter, acidic and astringent, the aroma as recalling gentian liqueur and rhubarb, and the finish as very persistent, above all in its bitterness. Spain’s reference guide describes a dominant bitterness with salty notes and the sweetness secondary, and Morocco’s protected honey is defined as very bitter and piquant, moderately sweet.

The bitterness changes with age. Antonio Gómez Pajuelo’s 2004 book on Spanish and Portuguese honeys found it dominant in a fresh honey, possibly still dominant after a year and no longer so after two, and the honey sensory analyst Lucia Piana describes new honeys as green and vegetal – ivy leaves, bark, sap, bitter herbs – and older ones as toasted, of coffee, burnt leather, tobacco and cocoa bean.

HoneyTraveler’s editor tasted a strawberry tree honey from the Hérault at a Paris honey shop in September 2026 and found the bitterness very light, coming after the sweetness: “that one just excites the taste buds a little and then you really taste the honey.”

Aroma:

Pungent: ivy leaves, coffee grounds, burnt leather and bitter herbs; gentian liqueur and rhubarb in the mouth

Defining Compounds:

Its chemistry marks it out. Homogentisic acid, a compound carried from the nectar, averaged 378 mg/kg in the honey and was proposed in 1999 as its marker because no other monofloral honey then tested contained it; a 2021 review notes that a Turkish thyme honey has since shown similar levels.

The bitterness comes from another compound. Unedone, first described in the honey in 2010, is present at 30 to 50 mg/kg, and a 2021 study found it responsible for the bitter taste: in its tests unedone at 300 mg/L tasted about as bitter as quinine at 10 mg/L. Homogentisic acid is not bitter, and arbutin, the leaf compound once blamed, is variable in the honey and sometimes absent.

Its electrical conductivity, a lab measure of the honey’s minerals, can pass the 0.8 mS/cm line that otherwise marks a honeydew honey, and French honey law names strawberry tree among the blossom honeys excepted from it.

Forage Origin:

Primary: strawberry tree (corbezzolo, arbousier, madroño, medronheiro, Arbutus unedo, Ericaceae). An evergreen shrub or small tree up to 8 metres, native from Portugal and Morocco to Turkey and Lebanon, that can dominate the Mediterranean scrub and in Sardinia forms whole woods. It favours loose, slightly acid soils below about 500 metres and grows back from its base after fire. It flowers from October to January, at times that follow altitude, and carries its white flowers beside the red fruit of the previous year’s flowering, which takes a year to ripen; Pliny noted it in the first century. Its flowers hold a great deal of nectar, but the honey carries little of its pollen, because of the flower’s form and the grains’ large size: 0.7 to 40 percent in Corsican samples and 4 to 59 percent in Greek ones.

Secondary: ivy (Hedera helix, Araliaceae). Ivy flowers in the same season and its pollen is abundant in the honey: 31 to 84 percent in Greek samples, and the dominant pollen in some Corsican ones.

Background: rough bindweed (Smilax aspera, Smilacaceae). An autumn plant of the maquis, found with it in Corsican honeys, and the same genus in Sardinian ones.

The name covers several trees. The eastern strawberry tree, Arbutus andrachne, native from Albania and Greece to northern Iraq, flowers in spring and has smaller fruit, and the two form a natural hybrid. In Libya’s Jebel Akhdar a separate species, Arbutus pavarii, gives a bitter honey called hanon. The Pacific madrone (Arbutus menziesii) of western North America belongs to the same genus, and no honey is sold from it as a varietal. The garden tree often called Arbutus marina is a hybrid, ‘Marina’, introduced in 1984 by the Saratoga Horticultural Research Foundation in California. The fruit, edible but, in the words of Italy’s honey sheet, not very tasty, goes into jams and liqueurs and, in Portugal, into aguardente de medronho, a fruit spirit.

Pairings:

Coffee first. Italy’s beekeepers’ union calls it “il miele perfetto per il caffè”, the perfect honey for coffee, the two bitternesses going well together. The union pairs it with bitter vegetables such as cardoons and artichokes, by likeness, and with sweet, fatty cheeses, by contrast. A cheese specialist’s list gives ricotta, mascarpone, sweet robiola and fresh goat’s cheese, and a Sardinian shepherds' cooperative serves it with semi-aged pecorino and pane guttiau, the island’s crisp flatbread.

In the kitchen the Corsican autumn maquis honey, mostly strawberry tree, goes into dishes from goat’s-cheese salads and scallops to foie gras, roast kid and cochon nustrale, the island’s own breed of pig. A Paris honey shop suggests the Corsican strawberry tree honey in place of cocoa in a fondant or ganache, and an Italian food magazine suggests it as a glaze for lamb.

Health Uses:

The honey has a long reputation in folk medicine. Sardinia’s forest agency describes it as antiseptic and often used for bronchial ailments, and the island’s register of traditional products records its traditional use against coughs. Kew calls it a popular folk medicine in the Mediterranean.

Laboratory studies have measured a high antioxidant capacity and activity against bacteria in vitro; these are test-tube results, not trials in people.