When browsing the honey section at my local grocery store, I always see different types of honey being sold such as wildflower honey, manuka honey, or even poison oak honey. Why do these types of honey look different? Why do they taste different? What about the honey making process is responsible for this variation? This curiosity drove me to research the topic and find out!
[1] Shop with various flavors of honey
Before explaining why honey differs, we should first understand how honey is made. The journey of making honey begins with the collection of nectar by a worker bee. To gather nectar, a bee flies from flower to flower sucking nectar out of them using its straw-like proboscis or tongue. As the bee drinks from the flower, the collected nectar gets stored in one of its stomachs. Yes, one of its stomachs–– honey bees have two stomachs! They have a regular stomach for digesting food as well as a honey stomach for transporting nectar. This honey stomach is special because it contains the digestive enzymes required to begin breaking down the structure of complex sugars in nectar, such as sucrose, into the simple sugars glucose and fructose. For a bee to fill its honey stomach entirely, it may have to visit over 1,000 flowers and that amount of nectar can weigh as much as the bee itself! Imagine carrying your body weight in nectar–that's a whole lot of nectar!
[2] Honey bee collecting nectar.
After foraging, a bee returns to the hive and transfers all the nectar it collected from its honey stomach to another worker bee. This other worker bee continues digesting the nectar to convert the complex sugar into simple sugars before transferring it to yet another worker bee. After a few transfers of the nectar have occurred, and the bees have exposed the nectar to the air to evaporate some water, the worker bee deposits it into a cell of the hive where a younger hive bee flaps its wings to aerate the nectar and drive its water content below 18%. After this is complete, the hive bee caps the cell with beeswax and the product is officially considered honey!
So where does variation in the flavor and appearance of the honey come from? The answer is simple––it comes from the properties of the nectar collected. We often think of nectar as being one consistent thing, but in reality, nectar varies greatly in composition and concentration. Nectar consists of a wide variety of molecules such as amino acids, alkaloids, phenols, and even volatile compounds which give flowers their scent. This chemical makeup of nectar is affected by a whole range of things including the type of flower, the types of visitors that frequent the flower, and the season, just to name a few factors.
A component that influences nectar I found especially interesting was how the types of visitors a flower gets affects the type of nectar it produces. The role of nectar production by a flower is to attract animals that will take the nectar and pollinate the flower in the process. This is a mutualistic relationship between the flower and the animal. It has been found that the chemical composition of nectar a flower produces is influenced by what the most frequent types of visitors find the most attractive. So for example, butterflies, hummingbirds, and long-tongued bees have been found to prefer nectar with lots of sucrose whereas short-tongued bees, like honey bees, and flies prefer nectars rich in fructose and glucose. Research suggests that the chemical composition of nectar might represent a plant's adaptation to the preferences of the animals that visit them. So flowers that butterflies frequent would have nectar higher in sucrose than say a plant that honey bees frequent. Because of this variation in the ingredient that becomes honey, it's reasonable for these differences to become apparent when the honey is produced.
Now we know why honey varies! It all comes down to the variation in the sugar content and chemical composition of the nectar that bees collect. Does this mean that the honey will taste like the scent of the flower that the bees collected from? Yes and no––most honey is made with nectar collected from a large variety of flowers around a hive which is typically known as “wildflower honey.” However, there are also types of honey referred to as “univarietal” or “monofloral” honey such as blueberry honey and buckwheat honey. For these monofloral types, they are made by surrounding a hive in a three mile radius predominantly with a specific type of plant, in these examples, either blueberries or buckwheat plants. This is done so the type of nectar bees are collecting comes primarily from the desired plant. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean the honey will taste like the seeds/fruit of that certain plant or have the scent of those flowers. In the case of blueberry honey, it does have a slight indigo color and the flavor notes of a blueberry, but buckwheat honey doesn’t taste like buckwheat. Regardless, the process of honey production is remarkable and the variety of nectar in nature is what gives us the variety of honeys for us to enjoy!
Further Reading:
Be Smart. “How Do Bees Make Honey?” YouTube, PBS, 28 Mar. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZlEjDLJCmg.
Ekasetya, Laura. “Why Honeys Taste Different and How You Can Learn to Appreciate Them.” Lurie Garden, https://www.luriegarden.org/2016/10/14/appreciate-honeys-variety/.
González-Teuber, Marcia, and Martin Heil. “Nectar Chemistry Is Tailored for Both Attraction of Mutualists and Protection from Exploiters.” Plant Signaling & Behavior, vol. 4, no. 9, 1 Sept. 2009, pp. 809–813., https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.4.9.9393.
Nicolson, Susan W. “Sweet Solutions: Nectar Chemistry and Quality.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 377, no. 1853, 2 May 2022, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0163.
Media Credits:
[1] Photo by David Saddler https://flic.kr/p/2nxVChA, License: CC BY 2.0
[2] Photo by Prof Donaldson
[3] Photo by Dimitri Avila
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