Thistle Honey

Botanical Name: Thistles (tribe Cardueae)

Botanical Family: Asteraceae

Bee Species:

Thistle honey is the work of Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee, wherever it is made. The international and national standards that describe these honeys are written for that bee and name no other, California’s state pest programme names honey bees on yellow star-thistle, and Japan, which keeps Apis cerana japonica, the Japanese honey bee, alongside the Western bee, records none of its thistle honey from it. Searches in fifteen languages turned up no stingless-bee or Apis dorsata (giant Asian honey bee) thistle honey anywhere.

Color:

Amber with a green cast in the liquid honey, clearest in direct sunlight; light brown to beige once it has set

Flavor Profile:

Moderately sweet, weakly to medium bitter, often with a salty sensation, and a light astringency that stays after swallowing

Tasting Notes:

The honey enters floral and fruity, and then an animal note arrives suddenly and briefly. What Italy’s tasters reached for, on the national characterisation sheet, is preserved fish: salted anchovy, salt cod and bottarga. The sheet’s own caveat sits beside it: the sensation varies greatly from one taster to another and is poorly reproducible, usually caught on the first taste and gone on the second. Bitterness is weak to medium, a salty sensation is often reported, and a light astringency stays after swallowing.

Hold the liquid honey up to direct sunlight, as the sheet directs, and the green shows. A Polish cornflower-honey producer gives the same test for a different thistle in a different country: held to the light the jar reads dark yellow, and looked at from above in lower light it is distinctly green. He tells buyers that if they cannot see it, the jar is not cornflower honey.

These descriptions are Italian. The laboratory sensory work done elsewhere is on the other thistles: one Turkish milk-thistle honey, German and Polish cornflower honeys, and three Algerian milk thistles, one of which a tasting panel placed with a rosemary honey among the Algerian varietals that matched Polish honeys for acceptance. North America’s star thistle honeys have no description above shop copy.

Aroma:

Floral and fruity on one side and animal on the other, of daisy and chrysanthemum, with a fleeting note of preserved fish, salted anchovy and salt cod

Defining Compounds:

A Cagliari and Sassari team analysing 23 Sardinian and one Sicilian sample found an unusual compound they identified as lumichrome, at an average 29.4 milligrams per kilogram, alongside an unusually high 418.6 milligrams per kilogram of phenyllactic acid, and proposed the pair as markers for the botanical classification of unifloral Galactites honey.

Both compounds turn up again in cornflower honey, with riboflavin, vitamin B2 itself, beside them. A Polish sample set gave lumichrome at 4.7 to 10.0 milligrams per kilogram, riboflavin at 1.9 to 2.7 and phenyllactic acid at 112.1 to 250.5, named as typical of that honey type. Each paper states its own result for its own plant, and no source states a mechanism common to the two.

The smell of these honeys is carried by terpenes, and mostly by relatives of linalool, the compound behind the scent of lime and citrus honeys. Sixteen of them were identified in New Zealand nodding thistle honey, and in a Turkish milk-thistle honey hotrienol alone made up 47.5 per cent of everything the honey gave off. None of these compounds is specific to thistles, since the same linalool derivatives dominate citrus and Paliurus honeys. The chemical markers, like the pollen, identify the tribe and not the species.

There is no European reference range for any thistle honey, so every figure here is a national sheet’s or a single study’s.

Forage Origin:

The bees take floral nectar from the florets of a thistle flower head. What looks like one flower is a capitulum, a cluster of small tubular florets, and nectar is measured over the whole cluster: in a four-city British survey creeping thistle gave 2,609 micrograms of nectar sugar per head over twenty-four hours, second of sixty-five species.

Six genera carry a honey sold under the one English word, and the literature credits them unequally. Europe’s register of the species giving unifloral honey names seven thistle-tribe plants and ranks nearly all of them rare, among them Galactites tomentosa, medium in Italy on the same scale, and Cirsium arvense, the creeping thistle. Four genera it does not name at all: Carduus, the nodding and curled thistles; Silybum, the milk thistle; Onopordum, the cotton or Scotch thistle; and Cynara, the cardoon and artichoke. The standard European bee-forage reference credits Carduus and Galactites between them with a unifloral thistle honey, and lists Silybum, Onopordum and Echinops, the globe thistles, as bee plants without making the claim for them.

Italy is where the species question has been put on the record, and the answer there is that nobody knows. The national characterisation sheet says most unifloral cardo (thistle) honey is presumably produced by Galactites tomentosa, but that other species, among them Carduus and Cirsium, probably give unifloral crops too; the beekeepers’ union puts it more bluntly, that it is not clear which species produce the monofloral honey, and the one Italian house whose own product page prints a genus prints Carduus, not the Galactites the sheet presumes. The reason the question stays open is in the microscope: the sheet’s own caption calls what the analyst sees Asteraceae type S, thistles and allied species, so the analyst reports a type and the beekeeper supplies the species name. No study has yet applied DNA metabarcoding to tell thistle species apart in honey, although the method resolves species in honey better than pollen counting does.

The Mediterranean plant is a spiny biennial of uncultivated ground, ruins and roadsides from sea level to 1,300 metres. The Italian sheet records that it is most significantly present in areas that have been subject to fire, and that the stands are often associated with intensive grazing: the crop comes off burnt and grazed ground after a wet spring, not off ground left alone.

Away from the Mediterranean the thistles that carry a honey arrived with agriculture. Creeping thistle reached North America in the 1600s in crop seed and ship’s ballast and was listed as a noxious weed in at least twenty-nine American states on a 2001 count. Yellow star-thistle reached California around 1850 by way of South America and now infests over 14 million acres, and California’s pest programme calls it an important late-season food source for honey bees while reporting, in the same document, that honey bees account for about half its seed set.

New Zealand’s national honey exchange keeps nodding thistle as one of fifteen trading grades and reports none of the variety currently available. Three biological control agents were introduced against Carduus nutans in 1972, 1984 and 1990, and revisits to 118 release sites found mean density down about 79 per cent. The register cannot definitively link that fall to biocontrol, but it records no change in the control species over the same sites, which it reads as pointing to biocontrol rather than to a change in land management; a peer-reviewed study of seed predation finds the agents’ impact insufficient to make the population decline. The plant is still there, and nobody has measured the honey.

Several honeys carry a thistle name and no thistle. Sow thistle (Sonchus) belongs with the chicories and its pollen is counted inside the dandelion type. Sea holly and field eryngo (Eryngium) are carrot-family plants, and the European register prints the Italian name calcatreppola for field eryngo, which the same table also prints for Centaurea solstitialis. The Arabic name is a thorn word, honey of the thorn (عسل الشوك, ‘asal al-shawk), and the Levantine and Egyptian sellers who name a plant name trees; Turkish diken balı (thorn honey) on the Datça coast is Paliurus spina-christi, the Christ’s thorn, as is Georgia’s thorn honey; and teasel, which made a real New York honey until the wool trade stopped buying teasel heads, is not a thistle either.

Two jars show how far a name travels. A Saskatchewan farm listed a seasonal Sow Thistle honey in the province’s 2019 producer list and jarred it in two sizes; the jar listing now reads no longer available, and the same farm’s 2024 entry names Fall Wildflower in its place. An Egyptian brand prints THISTLE BLOSSOM HONEY in English over an Arabic name that means the thorny ones, on a jar whose nectar, by the brand’s own account, came from wild Arabian thorn trees.

One naming fault runs the other way: the Slow Food Ark of Taste, Slow Food’s catalogue of foods it judges at risk, lists the Sardinian honey in English as cardoon honey, where the Italian sources behind it name Galactites, Carduus and Cirsium, and the cultivated cardoon is cut before it flowers. Milk thistle, for its part, is grown as a seed crop for silymarin, the liver extract, which is in the seed and not in the honey.

Pairings:

Two Italian registers state a pairing for this honey and they point the same way. Sardinia’s own sheet calls it an excellent sweetener for milk and for ricotta. Campania’s sheet gives fresh ricotta, or sweetening a strong black tea.

The national beekeepers’ union offers it against cheese, and does so conditionally: bloomy-rind cheeses, the soft white-crusted kind, could be matched with floral honeys such as citrus, thyme or thistle, where the cheese is not excessively fatty.

Across the producing countries sellers describe the same four uses over and over: cheese, tea or coffee, bread or toast, and yogurt. The American jar is a mild, light honey sold as an everyday sweetener; the Italian one is a bitter-finishing honey sold against cheese.

Health Uses:

The one traditional use on record sits on a government’s own sheet. Sardinia’s register, last updated in April 2021, describes its cardo honey as sweet but slightly pungent and intense for the presence of iron, and as curative for the anaemic; the island’s thistle honey has since been measured at 340 micrograms of iron per kilogram, the second of the four Sardinian unifloral honeys analysed.

Beyond that sheet the record is of the plant rather than of the honey. Searches in Italian, Turkish, Greek, Russian, English and Spanish return present-day seller copy or the traditional medicine of the plant, and the standard English herbal of 1931, which catalogues fourteen thistles and every use its author could find, never mentions honey.

The honey is sold in Greece and Turkey on milk thistle’s liver reputation. That reputation belongs to silymarin, and no analysis has found it in the honey.