Tupelo.

Tupelo honey...and we ain't talkin' about the Van Morrison song. It's by far my favorite. It's got a slight greenish cast, doesn't crystalize and a flavor...that's well...well...never mind...I won't even try...

Found this info on the web:
Tupelo honey is produced from the Tupelo gum tree which grows profusely along the Chipola and Apalachicola rivers of northwest Florida. Here in the river swamps, this honey is produced in a unique fashion. Bees are placed on elevated platforms along the river's edge, from which, during April and May they fan out through the surrounding Tupelo-blossom-laden swamps and return with their precious treasure. This river valley is the only place in the world where Tupelo Honey is produced commercially.

Well, txbeeguy, California may be the best state in the Union, but not for Tupelo honey, I guess. Looks like it only comes from Florida. Maybe the only decent export from that Godforsaken state.

There is one other honey that I've always wanted to try but never have. I believe it comes from the U.S. northwest, maybe from northern CA or Oregon or WA state (not sure exactly where). It's supposed to come from a weed called Fire Thistle - I may not have that exactly right but it's close. And perhaps I'm more intrigued by the name than anything else but somewhere in my ancient history, I locked down in my mind that someone said that it was great tasting honey. Ever since then, I've want to taste test it for myself!

I was hoping there would be more postings on this subject.
I have tried the Tupelo honey. I obtained it from a little town, I forget the name of the town, but an hour east of Fort Myers, Florida.
There is this very pleasant store, owned by a beekeeping family of many mnay years. They yet produce their own honey, Orange Blossom being one of them, as they are right in the midst of miles and miles of orange groves.
But they offer many types of honey for sale
Including a small amount of Buckwheat, which I agree is quite nice, in small amounts.

I am not knowledgeable at all, in regards to honey.
I do know though, that the honey sold commercially, in most large grocery stores, is really not honey at all. Shame for people to not know a difference.
That applies to honey and so many other foods, nowadays.

y neat little store

{{gwi:434537}}

txbeeguy, the plant to which you refer is fireweed, and it grows rampant all over the northwest, thru BC and the Yukon to Alaska. It got its name because it's the first thing that grows back after a forest fire, and it's reddish, so it looks like the fire that just swept through the area. Stunningly beautiful. I'm not sure how well bees would survive that far north, but if they do, you'd want to look for beekeepers in Canada or maybe the northest USA.

Canada Thistle makes good honey too!
There is some fire weed around here but not enough to make honey from this plant alone, I have a good mix incl. willow, dandelion, many native fruit trees like sour cherries, choke cherries for pollen source, Saskatoon, Canada Thistle and most of all white and red clover incl. alfalfa.....I love my honey!!
Konrad

HI
I lurk over here every so often. I never post because I don't have bees, wish I did, but it just doesn't seem viable. My dad kept bees once upon a time and so did several uncles in FL

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is that the little town about an hour east of Ft Myers is called LaBelle. And the honey shop has been there for an eternity. LaBelle also has/had a really good used book store and the Swamp Cabbage Festival.

I keep bees, and my favorite so far was a harvest from a couple of years ago called "spanish needles". It is a type of burr and makes a really good dark honey. I always like almost any late summer honey (Except maybe goldenrod)

my fav is sourwood honey

I have tasted so many over the years..one I really liked was believe it or not..Avacado! The other, Palmetto! Weird, huh? To bee honest though, the best honey I have EVER had is the stuff I get here at home. East Texas wild flower honey...No kidding, it is the best I have ever had. I mail a lot to friends ect. and they agree. Perfect richness...medium/light color. Lucky me....

hello i do not keep bees yet but i like to read in books and i appreciate this forum. i hope to soon be apprentice to a beekeeper in the north. i am in love with honey. it is my favorite food.

my favorite honey is a raw alfalfa honey that amish farmers from lancaster, pennsylvania bring to a philadelphia farmers market. it is white and its taste resembles cinnamon to me.

my favorite honeys are also nearly every area wildflower honey that i've tasted so far. what first comes to me strongly, however, is a raw wildflower honey made from the wildflowers of the negev in israel. it is a dark, dark honey and tastes like a million layers of flavors. soon i hope to meet the beekeeper. he takes his bees all over the country.

my favorite honey that came to me from import is a rare white hawaiin honey from the kiawe trees. www.volcanoislandhoney.com i also very, very much enjoy the honey from www.reallyrawhoney.com but i prefer to be closer to or more familiar with the honey source.

i just say "raw" to make sure no one is heating or filtering their honeys.

Good topic. When I was younger I had some hives in the desert around Tucson and my favorite was the honey that came from Acacia greggii (catclaw). Wish I could remember a honey I got in the White Mountains of AZ. Bluish tint to it and I would have to place it at the top of my list right next to Catclaw.

The bees that I had in our Anza Borrego Desert area were feeding mainly on mesquite, ironwood, tamarisk, perhaps palo verde or creosote. The honey was definitely stronger than the bees I now keep here near the ocean.

These feed mainly on the fruit and flowers I am growing, the oranges, lime, lemons, though seem to be especially interested in borage and the ice plant Aptenia (a form of mesembryanthum)ground cover. But they also forage in the canyon - prickly pear cactus, wild flowers, mustards, etc.

I especially like the honey, it is quite thick, amber in color, and the flavor doesn't overpower anything that I cook with it -that is the important thing. Very happy with it.

Bejay

bejay, If you're living near the ocean now, west of the Anza Borrego desert, then you must be fairly near me. I'm in Encinitas. My bees are on a local farm where I work. Unfortunately, several of the neighbors have Brazillian Pepper trees, which makes my honey taste terrible wherever it's in flower, so I have to set aside one super for "Pepper-tree time" and separate supers for "non-Pepper tree time". Makes for a complicated arrangement. Interestingly, it seems as if my honeycomb has some medicianal properties, but I'll address that in a separate thread.

How do you manage to set aside these supers so they are not contaminated with Brazilian pepper pollen?

I cringe every time the castor bean is in bloom. Someone once planted them long before we came here (in 69) and they have been re-seeding from the canyon where the cuttings were dumped. I think that is one plant that should be outlawed in California.

Anyway, the bees seem to like the blossoms and feed on them at such times. They grow rampantly down in the canyon below me. I try to assure myself that if the blossoms do contain poison, the amount is so small as not to be significant. I'm sure bees also pick up a lot of other so-called poison plant pollens also.

You are close about my location - a bit south. When we first came here, there were a lot of hives below us in the canyon. Then came development. I don't know where they were moved to, but we still see many swarms in spring and early summer - in fact, that is how I obtained my colony.

Just my 2 c's.

Bejay

Raw honey is the best. I prefer the honey from the hills of Western North Carolina where I live. The wildflower and sourwood honey from this region are both very unique and outstanding.

The sourwood honey is light in color with a very sweet and mild flavor. The wildflower honey tastes like a symphony of floral varieties in your mouth. It is quite delicious.

Here is a link that might be useful: North Carolina Honey

I got some nice honey this past year off of horse mint. So far everybody has loved it.

Starthistle honey is one of the most delicately-flavored honeys; light gold in color and not overthick, it is sublime in its ability to complement many different dishes and serve many purposes.

Northern California has this honey fairly often; in drier areas it is the prime nectar/pollen source in summer.

I've tried very few honeys myself, but so far my favorite is a wildflower honey that my cousin's bees give. KFC actually offered him a contract to make sure they were the only fast food place to get his honey, but he declined. He said he didn't want to stress his bees out by making so much honey. I think he has... 12 hives? I may be wrong. I wish I could have bees...

Abby

This year our honey had a very distinctive flavor. The only thing we can attribute it to is the abundant lavendar and blackberry. I've planted even more lavender so I guess we'll see how it is next harvest.

Annette

What an interesting list of honeys. So many new tastes to try. I'll add two I like, herb-flavored honeys from France: I like the rosemary and thyme honeys. I've only seen them abroad or as imports, but some may be produced in the U.S.

this is a great thread!

I'm a fan of Avocado, too. Heavy and unique, but delicious.

I've had some incredibly light honey early in the season...I think it might have been ghost agave (A. attenuata, I think).

Interesting to hear complaints about pepper tree....years like this (drought) I think that the pepper trees are the only thing that will provide enought pollen.

I have some castor bean plants around (almost too dry this year), but I cross my fingers and hope that if it were a problem, I'd know. I did have a problem a year or two ago with Brugmansia killing a few thousand bees (I think). THAT made me nervous about future honey harvests, but the honey was almost exclusively in the brood area, so I am not too worried about harvest.

-dr

Funny how people in god forsaken states like to accuse other states of the same thing. Typical. Enjoy your traffic.

bandit_tx:
We occasionally get some horse mint honey (nectar flow) - but it's something we try to AVOID! :-)

It has a litte aftertaste bite to it that most of our local honey judges ("experts") don't value too highly.

...just goes to show you: there's no accounting for taste!

Not to change the subject but I didn't know that Brugmansia is lethal to bees. Are you sure of that? Jimson weed (datura) is poisonous (at least to people) and hallucenogenic and is native and grows all over here. Besides visiting the flower the only effect I've seen on bees with this flower is that sometimes they seem unable to get out of the large blossom. I hear buzzing and look down and see the bee trying to fly itself out it but it's as if the sides are slippery and it keeps falling back. Then I tilt the flower down and it gets out.

I'm sure the first mentioned is from the star thistle, which is a light and wonderful honey from this thistle which has small yellow flowers.
One of the first honeys I ever gathered from my backyard hives was tulip poplar. I always like that.
But this is kind of like my favorite fruit. I like the one best that's in season and which I have available to me.
With honey right now I guess that's lehua--from the ohia lehua forests of Hawaii. But coffee blossom (related to gardenia) also makes a fragrant and tasty honey.

Now here's a double pun for you---coffee honey, can you get a buzz off it?

My all-time favorite honey flavor is Meadowfoam. It comes from a thistle, but I'm not sure if it's any of the thistles that have been mentioned here. I have never been able to decide how to describe the flavor - vanilla comes to mind. The sweetness is the richest to my senses of any I can recall. Only drawback was that it turned to sugar quickly. I used to stock up on it at $5 per 1-pound jar, over 20 years ago, from a seller in the Monterey Calif. area. I can't find it anymore, but truthfully have not searched for it for over a year.

I've noticed many mention Tupelo. I occasionally visit NW Florida and discovered Tupelo honey on one trip there many years ago. I have a small jar of it now, emptying fast, given to me recently by a family member who knows how I like different honeys. I'm torn between Tupelo and orange blossom as to which is my favorite honey from the Southern US.

Also recently, in the same gift pack, I got my first taste of the white Hawaiian kiawe honey. It's my favorite flavor discovery of this year. I just finished that jar last weekend and am already shopping the websites (one already mentioned here) for a refill.

When I was much younger and lived in Southern California, I used to go through 5-pound cans of Buckwheat honey in 1-2 months. It was an acquired taste for me - and remains the flavor most dissimilar from all other flavors I recall.

A few years ago I bought a jar of what I believe was local honey at the touristy place in Wall, SD. That flavor was memorable, very sweet, like clover honey which is my "standard," but slightly superior. A few years before that I picked up a jar of sweet honey in Ontario, Canada, and hold many regrets for not noting its specifics.

Finally, two distinctive flavors that I enjoy very much are Manuka (from New Zealand, I believe) and Blue Borage.

My favorite is Acacia honey which I have been finding at farmers markets imported from Italy and Romania. It's a very light color and tastes very, very good. The price has gone up (about doubled) in the past few months, I don't know whether that's because of colony collapse disorder?

This acacia honey is wonderful in fresh mint and lemon verbena tea. Before I found it, I was not a big honey fan because it seemed to add an aftertaste to my tea, but now I am converted. I only wish it weren't so expensive. I figure if things keep on going as they have been, we should all invest in honey as though it were fine wine, and a jar of honey bought now could be worth its weight in gold in the coming years.

Geez, now that I've started this thread, I find myself hankering for every type of honey described. Some of you have provided links for purchasing the honeys you enjoy. I would entreat future posters to do likewise.

I have recently started taking a teaspoonful of Active (15+) Manuka Honey a day and the effects have been startling. I feel brighter, more energetic , altogether calmer and less depressed. It's not cheap at £10.99 a jar but worth every penny and lasts a long while. Thought this might help others that are feeling low of mood and generally debilitated.