Mystery Tree ID

Tupelo and sour wood honey are available for those without a local apiary down the road Amazon has it. @BlueBerry for a true honey conosuir if money is not the objective try manukora from around the globe it’s different and I like it alot. Back to the tree I think you all are getting it narrowed down. Looks very close.

1 Like

I’ve eaten Tupelo honey…I like most honey.

Sourwood is my favorite…I usually get a quart in NC sometime once a year.
I have a fresh qt. of local clover honey currently that is meeting my needs.

Amazon is over used. And no, I haven’t tried the manukora…though it is available for a price at Meijers grocery.

2 Likes

Sourwood honey is not my favorite, to me it’s too “harsh”. I’ve always liked Poplar though. The honey is darker but milder tasting.

But then I didn’t eat any honey for probably 20 years. As a teenager we robbed a bunch of supers and extracted it. I manned the hot knife skimming off the cell caps. Warm knife, the soft cap comb, with a dab of honey on each. Way too many slices of that I ate, mmmm it was so good. I overdid it, some may say I “foundered” on it. Made me sick and I couldn’t even be around it for a very long time. It was literally 20 years before I ate another bite I bet… Shew, couldn’t stand the thought of it :slight_smile:

1 Like

Yep…harvested over two tons of liquid honey a couple different years using a hot knife.
Fortunately I never got sick on the honey! :grinning:

By the way, my now 34 year old daughter ‘helped’ me harvest honey and put her finger under the spout for a taste more than once when I was extracting…that was when she was less than one year old! At age 5 she had her own ‘bee suit’ and I only had a hat and veil.

3 Likes

In the premium honey category, Buckwheat (on buckwheat pancakes!), Leatherwood (Australia), Fireweed (U.S. and Canada), Tupelo (swamp tupelo, U.S.), and Sourwood (eastern U.S.) are worth searching for and trialing. There are several other single varietal honeys that are worth looking up. Unfortunately, most of us never try anything other than common as dirt bland clover honey. Manuka honey is arguably the highest priced honey on earth typically running between $40 and $100 per pint. If you find Manuka cheaper, suspect it of being a blend with cheaper honey.

2 Likes

How do you all train your whole hive of bees to visit specific species of flowers at a give time period.

3 Likes

Make a poster and put the directions on it to the preferred blooms you desire honey from. Post it in a conspicuous place near the hives. :upside_down_face:

Mostly it’s up to the bees.
But, if there’s a source you hope they visit (say a pumpkin patch)…moving the hives and placing them beside the patch after a several are blooming is one method of increasing the odds of getting them to work the desired blossoms.

Other than that…be very observant (that is how I lucked into tasting poison ivy honey once).

1 Like

Bees exhibit floral fidelity naturally. To harvest single varietal honey, it is usually necessary that no other major competing nectar source is blooming at the same time. Most single floral honey is from species that produce abundantly usually for a relatively short time period of a few days to a few weeks. As an example, Sourwood usually blooms in June and produces abundantly for about 10 days. Citrus is different because it can produce abundantly for up to 2 months which helps explain why there is so much “orange blossom” honey on the market. I live in an area where Chinese privet produces abundantly for about 2 weeks giving me a good crop of excellent tasting premium honey. I also get an occasional crop of Sourwood honey.

  1. A large number of plants of a single or closely related species in an area that tend to bloom all at once.
  2. A large field population of healthy honeybees in each hive that is harvesting the nectar.

It is a lot harder than you would think to get all the factors in place at the same time. As an example, in 2007 an April 7th freeze (22 degrees overnight) killed almost all of the spring bloom in my area. I got zero surplus honey that year. It was so bad that none of my hives attempted to swarm.

I’ll add a few more types of premium honey to think about. Kiawe honey is an outstanding light colored mild but pleasant flavored honey from Hawaii. It is very hard to find good Kiawe honey. Orange Blossom honey is actually made from several different species of citrus including grapefruit, satsuma, and lemon. It might not be as good as fireweed honey, but it still makes pancakes taste luscious. Basswood (linden) honey is also an excellent table grade honey. As I mentioned above, Chinese privet makes a premium honey. It is an invasive species but at least has one redeeming characteristic. Mesquite honey can be exceptional. It is almost all produced in the Southwestern U.S.

4 Likes

My grandfather’s favorite honey was “Lin” (Basswood) by the way.

As you said @BlueBerry he was just very observant and knew what his bees were working at a particular time.

Sourwood blooms in June, hmm… They are just now blooming in my area and in the back of my mind it seemed like that was awfully late. The late freeze must have affected them too. Aprill 22 of this year it got to 23F for quite a few hours.

I’ve always wondered about that too. The bees kept on my place are hitting wildflowers, clover, and pumpkins heavily right now. How would such a honey be marketed?

We’re given 8 qts of honey annually for “allowing” the bee keepers to keep their bees here. It’s very good honey IMO

1 Like

Native American linden is very rare but I come across one occasionally in or near the Daniel Boone National Forest.

Sourwood…I’ve not taken a look-see here…maybe one in 10 years a bit of sourwood honey is produced in my area. I typcially think June 20…about time Dutch clover often dries up…to about July 30 as being sourwood bloom … depending on elevation and on the year.

Generally ,if one wants to harvest a single source honey, let’s say sourwood. The best you can do is to put empty supers on at the start of sour wood bloom take them off when that bloom ends . That would be mostly sourwood honey.
So in each region, there is a plant that is so attractive to bees that that’s predominantly what they work at that time.
Sure there is other nectars in there.
Some years one source is better than another.
I never saw the point in separating the different types.
It’s all good …some taste different than others

That poster in the bee yard that blueberry mentioned , with directions/ preferences could not hurt.

3 Likes

I think sometimes for unknown reasons, one hive in an apiary will find something different than the other hives…and once they zero in on a good source or nectar, they are usually ‘faithful’ to it.

In years gone by, have gotten excited to see ‘hairy vetch’ honey, and ‘carolina buckthorn’ honey, for instance. And saddened to get dandelion honey.

One year had some as black as used motor oil, never did figure out the source the bees got it from.

1 Like

There are more Linden varieties than I realized. Not sure which kind is predominant in my area, I assume American Basswood. Probably 4 or 5 of them on my property which are a foot and a half in diameter or so.

2 Likes

Is that oil from a gasoline engine or diesel engine.

Maybe I should have said black like an old tire?
Or black like the residents on Negro Creek Road in Brodhead, KY?

2 Likes

Genetics is usually the reason. I’ve had bees with known different genetics as from Carniolans, Italians, and black (mellifera mellifera) bees that made dramatically different honey in the same year working slightly different preferred nectar sources. It has been known for over 100 years that honeybees can be selected for preferential foraging on some crops. As an example, bees that preferred to forage on alfalfa were selected about 70 years ago.

The blackest honey I ever saw was made from honeydew. Also, buckwheat honey is a very deep blackish red color. I had a customer years ago who would pay a premium for the darkest honey I could find, especially if it came from a bee tree in the woods.

1 Like