Hi,
A while ago I read that clover honey, and alfalfa honey are more prone to crystallization than other types. How do manufacturers know where the bees having been going? Is honey the result of something the bees excrete? And, is there a way of telling which kind of honey one has, other than the label (which usually doesn’t say)?
Thanks,
… john
It can be determined by the location of the colony. If it’s in the middle of a field of clover, then the bees will be gathering most of the nectar from the clover. If it’s in a field of alfalfa, then the nectar will come from alfalfa. Bees take the nectar and make honey from it.
You can also look at the honey under a microscope to see the pollen grains. Different plants often have pollen of different shapes and these are in the honey.
Honey has very different character and distinctive i.e. colour, viscosity, aroma & taste depending on the nectar source and will vary between seasons.
Commerial producers usually blend honey from different sources to get a consistent product.
A honey from eucalypts is dark & thick while honey from Paterson’s Curse or canola is almost clear and free flowing.
A fair bit of the character is due to the volume of nectar so honey from bees pollinating broadacre crops tends to be paler and thinner.
Here’s the Master to gross you out:
BTW, my honey is called Beth. 
Thank you all for your replies. It was a REAL education.
… john
Just don’t get Mad Honey – it’ll make you sick
https://coxshoney.com/mad-honey-honey-will-drive-crazy
I had a discussion with a beekeeper about rhododendron-based Mad Honey at last year’s Topsfield State Fair*. He said it was really hard to make and find, fortunately, although there are people who go out of their way to get this for the medical effects.
*The next Topsfield Fair coming up is going to be the 200th anniversary one! Yay! (Not the 200th such fair, though – they didn’t hold it some years. It hasn’t been in the same place all that time, either. )
If you can watch the bees at work, you don’t even need a microscope; the bees carry pollen on their back legs, in what’s known as a ‘pollen basket’ (actually just some modified hairs). Pollen colour varies a lot more than you probably think, and it’s often possible to identify where the bees have been foraging just by looking. They’re specific to area and season, but you can get pollen ID guides to look up what your bees are collecting from.
Of course, it doesn’t always mean the nectar’s from that species, as they will visit some flowers for pollen and others for nectar- they’ll visit plants like willow trees purely to collect pollen as they’re wind pollinated so don’t produce nectar. In general they’ll only visit plants like that while nectar producing ones aren’t available, as all the nectar producing ones also produce pollen.
Honeybees display what’s called ‘crop fidelity’, so each bee will carry on visiting the same flower species for as long as it can, so in general they carry one pollen type at a time. Having said that, there can be 1000s of bees foraging from one colony at a time, and they don’t all always go for the same flowers, so your clover honey likely won’t be 100% from clover, but that should be the major source.
Oh, and hope they haven’t been collecting too much from rhododendron, which actually produces a poisonous honey 
Mad honey sounds like a load of fun, but is there an easy, reliable way to measure the potency in a given glop of honey? I don’t suppose I could guaranty the safety of my honey if I just plunked a grayanotoxin-bearing bush in a few acres of clover in an attempt to introduce the presence, but limit the upper limit of “contamination”.
One bush’d be fine. I’ve never heard of an instance of poisoning in the UK- in fact, as a member of the British Beekeeping association, they’ve sent me info saying there has not been any UK poisoning recorded from rhododendron honey, despite Rhododendron ponticum being a major invasive over here, so I’d guess you’d need a pretty significant proportion of your nectar to be affected. One bush is unlikely to even have an effect. They may not even visit it; interestingly, there are some studies that have shown British Apis mellifera mellifera (the local honeybee subspecies) to be killed by feeding on rhododendron honey, though the Turkish subspecies is unaffected, so your bees may even actively avoid it.
Also, the levels of toxin are not consistent between plants, even of the same species. This article claims that the concentration is lower in plants outside the native range and 1/5 of Rhododendron ponticum plants in areas where it’s not native actually don’t produce grayanotoxin in the honey, possibly due to the effect on pollinators.
Might need to import new plants as well as new bees.
I’ve also heard anecdotes about people in the Himalayas happily eating local honey without any ill effects, giving a bit to a visitor, and the visitor winding up in hospital with grayanotoxin poisoning; the effects are unpredictable, and are quite possibly affected by exposure… I wouldn’t bother.
Yeah, “medical effects.”
(A bit manic today, so bear with me)
Well now. You know, that article CalMeacham posted to piqued my interest in no small part because it reeked of the sort of yarn I like to spin. SO much better that it’s true. Now, between Filbert’s input, and my recent finishing of season 2 of Santa Clarita Diet, I’m on the fence between buying a few acres of Colorado high country and lacing it with clover and imported Rhodies (which don’t grow here without considerable attention) and Turkish honeybees; or just exercising a little restraint.
Evidently bees don’t do cannabis, so there goes that marketing idea.
My town does not allow beekeeping. As soon as I heard that I decided to plant Rhodies in my front yard.
Oh come on! You mean my $50 jar of “Liquid Hemp” is worthless?
Dennis
I have a book called “Honey Hunters Of Nepal” by Eric Valli and Diane Summers (ISBN 0-8109-2408-0). It is about members of the Gurungs peoples of Nepal who harvest honey from the nests of wild colonies of bees located on cliff faces. The authors travel with a band of honey hunters and describe their efforts. In the following passage they mention a precaution that must be taken when harvesting such wild honey.
“Mani Lai pours a little honey into the palm of his hand and examines the color. It is golden - a sign, the hunters say, that the nest is new. Black honey comes from a nest several months old they say, while red honey would indicate the bees had fed on a dead animal. Mani Lai announces that the honey is not laagne (toxic), for his palm does not tingle. Even so, he never eats honey during the hunt, especially before the the monsoon, for fear of being poisoned. The hunter’s explanation of the laagne honey is simple: bees sometimes collect nectar from poisonous flowers. Before the rains, the poison collects with the nectar, and the honey becomes laagne. After the monsoon rains “wash” the poison from the flowers the nectar is uncontaminated - the honey will be good.”
If you can observe the bees inside the hive, you can figure out where they’re getting the nectar by watching the ‘waggle dance’ - I doubt anyone does this for the purpose of classifying the honey, but the language by which bees tell other bees where they found nectar, and the method by which the bees ‘vote’ on the best contributions is quite remarkably well understood by humans.
Great, now I have this mental image of someone putting Rosetta Stone for Bees on thier MAcbook and wiggling thier butt around the room like Beavis and Butthead…
I am unaware of honeybees feeding on dead animals at any time; they get their protein needs from the pollen gathered. Yellowjackets, OTOH…
This was what the authors of the book reported the leader of the group of honey hunters they traveled with had to say. They also mention that the local species of bee is the Apis laboriosa, or Himalayan giant honey bee and say it is one of the most aggressive bees in the world. Wikipedia does not support the carnivorous origin of the red honey, which they also call spring honey, crediting it’s origins to flowers growing at higher altitudes. The article also says that the red honey has intoxicating and relaxing effects and is thus mostly exported due to the higher prices it fetches.
Clover and alfalfa are forage and cover crops. Farmers plant them and hire beekeepers for pollination. The honey produced from a hive placed in the middle of a field planted with just one crop will be monofloral, or pretty close to it.
The two main types of sugar in honey are sucrose and glucose. Glucose crystallizes a lot more readily than fructose, so those nectars that are high in glucose tend to form crystals. High-fructose honeys include tupelo and blackberry.
Creamed honey is processed in such a way as to form a lot of small crystals, which prevents it from forming large crystals. The crystals in creamed honey are small enough that they don’t feel gritty or crunchy in the mouth. Creamed honey is easy to spread (unlike crystallized uncreamed honey), although the viscosity prevents it from flowing like uncreamed honey does.
The book American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen has a very good chapter on American honeys. I recommend the book to any foodie.