Thyme Honey

Botanical Name: Thymes (Thymus spp.) and conehead thyme (Thymbra capitata)

Botanical Family: Lamiaceae

Bee Species:

Thyme honey comes from the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, in every register that names a bee. Some name a local race: both Turkish kekik designations name the Anatolian bee, Apis mellifera anatoliaca, and Babadağ’s also admits the Italian and Carniolan races, while Slow Food names the Saharan bee for the thyme honey of Ida Ou Tanane in Morocco.

Color:

Amber: light amber to amber, sometimes with a slight reddish tint, about 35 to 75 mm Pfund; darker in Morocco; beige to hazel once set

Flavor Profile:

Sweet, with a clear acid edge and no bitterness

Tasting Notes:

Italy’s sensory register describes a nose that opens floral, of rose, lily and florist’s flowers, then turns pungent, spicy and winey, with the cedarwood of a pencil and a note it calls chemical, like heated polystyrene. In the mouth the woody, resinous notes lead: aromatic herbs, pencil, plastic. Italy’s national sheet adds an aroma of thymol and of a pharmacy, a comparison by smell rather than a measured compound.

Two registers report a burn at the back of the throat. The Greek description of thyme honey says it sometimes gives one and attributes it to the honey’s fructose; the specification of Turkey’s Babadağ kekik honey describes a light one. The finish is medium on the international sheet and in the Italian register, and the Iberian sheet calls the aroma very intense and very persistent.

Aroma:

Floral, recalling rose, with woody, spicy, resinous and fresh-fruit notes and a note the registers call chemical; medium to strong

Defining Compounds:

Thyme honey’s chemical markers differ with the plant and the place. Greek chemists have proposed a small group of volatile compounds, with carvacrol, as markers found only in thyme honey. Other Greek chemists judged one of them no unambiguous marker of thyme honey, and a 2022 study cites reports of it in honeys with buckwheat pollen, so a buyer cannot read thyme from one compound.

Thymol, the compound that gives thyme its smell, is a trace in Greek thyme honey: all 47 samples in one study held it, at up to 65 micrograms a kilogram, and in another of 80 samples neither thymol nor carvacrol was among the main volatiles.

Thymol in a honey can come from the hive as well as the flower. It is a varroa treatment and leaves residues in the honey of treated hives, 0.12 to 8.80 mg a kilogram in a Sardinian trial, against a taste threshold of about 1.1. In a Turkish study one of six commercial thyme honeys carried thymol and carvacrol at levels the authors read as a sign of added thyme oil, and tasted of thyme without the character of honey.

Forage Origin:

The bees take nectar from the flowers of low, aromatic plants of the mint family, Lamiaceae, and two genera give the honey. Thymus, the thymes, counts 273 accepted species in Plants of the World Online, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’s world checklist. Conehead thyme, Thymbra capitata, is a single species, a subshrub native only to the Mediterranean, from Morocco and Portugal to Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Libya and Egypt. Botanists have filed it under several names, Thymus capitatus and Coridothymus capitatus among them, and laws and labels still print them: Crete’s protected honey designation says Coridothymus capitatus, Cypriot law counts its pollen as Thymus type, and a Jordanian producer prints all three names on its product page.

Which plant gives the honey depends on where it is made. Conehead thyme gives it in Greece, Cyprus, Malta, southern Italy, Israel, Jordan and Libya. Garden thyme, Thymus vulgaris, is the main source in Spain and southern France, and gives the honey of New Zealand’s Central Otago, where it was introduced. In Spain the thymes follow altitude, Thymus hyemalis in the low, warm zones and Thymus zygis and Thymus mastichina in the middle and upper zones, both of these fit, Spain’s agriculture ministry wrote in 1985, for distilling, for the herb trade and for honey. Morocco’s honey thyme is Thymus satureioides. In eastern Europe and Russia the wild thymes are sold under their own names, cimbrișor, kakukkfű, chabrets, with no species on the jar, and in Poland and Germany beekeepers set colonies beside thyme grown as a herb crop.

Thyme flowers carry plenty of nectar and few pollen grains, about 2,300 a flower in conehead thyme and Thymus mastichina, by a figure a study of Spanish thyme honeys relays, so thyme pollen reaches the honey in small numbers. The International Honey Commission lists it among the pollens that can be under-represented, with a range of 13 to 68 per cent, against the 45 per cent generally expected of a single-flower honey. Laboratories count the pollen of conehead thyme and of the true thymes together, as Thymus type.

Conehead thyme is a plant of summer heat. In a 1996 study its nectar rose with temperature up to 38 degrees Celsius, so long as the plant had water. Grazing animals find thyme unpalatable and eat it when pasture runs short, a Spanish ministry leaflet noted, and on grazed hillsides in the Cyclades conehead thyme did best under light to intermediate grazing, so the honey’s hillsides can carry flocks as well. The plant has no adaptation to fire and can vanish locally after one, and with it the flow the bees worked there.

Turkish kekik, Arabic za'atar and Persian avishan cover more than thyme

In Turkey kekik is a legal and trade word for several genera. The agriculture ministry's kekik report lists the species Turkey holds of the five genera traded as kekik, 38 Thymus, 23 Origanum, 14 Satureja, two Thymbra and one Coridothymus; the honey law's 10 per cent kekik floor names four genera.

The Codex Alimentarius, the international food-standards code, has a standard for raw za'atar products that, a 2021 review notes, allows four genera, Origanum, Thymbra, Thymus and Satureja. On Libyan and Jordanian thyme honey it is conehead thyme. In Lebanon and Israel it is mostly a wild oregano, Origanum syriacum: Lebanese honeys carry its pollen, a Lebanese house sells thyme honey as asal al-za'atar from wild za'atar above 1,000 metres, and an Israeli shop names the za'atar in its za'atar-and-shalmon honey as Origanum syriacum, a blend with Cephalaria joppensis that the shop says cannot be separated, the two flowering together. In Persian an Iranian seller glosses avishan as Thymus, and avishan-e Shirazi, Shirazi thyme, is Zataria multiflora, a related herb that grows wild only in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Savory honey is sold under a thyme word too. Abruzzo's honey from winter savory, Satureja montana, is known there also as miele di timo, Slow Food records; Romanian cimbru on its own is summer savory, Satureja hortensis, where cimbrișor and cimbru de câmp are wild thyme; and Polish cząber is the savory genus. In Spain mejorana silvestre, wild marjoram, can mean Thymus mastichina.

A honey with thyme or thyme oil added is not thyme honey. European Union law allows nothing to be added to honey, and allows a flower's name on the label only where the honey comes wholly or mainly from that flower and has its taste, chemistry and pollen.

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Pairings:

A popular way to eat Thyme honey in Greece is drizzled over fresh Greek yogurt (known as “Yiaourti me Meli”), perhaps with a few nuts. Italy’s honey observatory calls Greek yogurt the classic match for thyme honey, and suggests it as a table honey.

It goes with well-aged cheese. The regulator of the Málaga designation pairs its thyme honey with cured cheeses, strong infusions, meat stews and roasts, and rich desserts; Spain’s honey packers’ association with very cured cheeses and with meat; and Italy’s beekeepers’ union puts thyme among the floral honeys for bloomy-rind cheeses.

As an ingredient it goes into a marinade for raw meat and fish, a summer fruit salad and a honey vinaigrette, in the Italian observatory’s suggestions, and a Cretan producer sells a rakomelo of thyme honey, cinnamon and tsikoudia.

Health Uses:

In Greece thyme honey is reputed a tonic, antiseptic and strengthening, in an account of 1971 that Greek honey researchers relay; and in a survey of 147 Moroccan beekeepers, run in 2017 and 2018, it was the honey most often named for wounds.