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acidity: Pertaining to the level of sourness or tartness of flavor.
adult honey bee: The honey bee most people are familiar with. She flies, collects nectar and pollen, cares for the young, and can sting.
African honey bees: Several races of honey bees originating in Africa that have retained their ferocious behaviors in defense of their nests, food, and young.
aftertaste: See finish.
American Apicultural Areas (AAA): Distinct terroir regions in the United States where specific honey plants grow.
American foulbrood: A spore-forming bacterial disease infecting larvae honey bees that is controlled by antibiotics administered by beekeepers, or by the destruction through burning of the infected bees and the equipment they inhabited.
animal: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of sweat, leather, or daisies.
Ark of Taste: An international list of foods threatened by industrial agriculture, environmental degradation, and homogenization. Part of the grassroots nonprofit organization, Slow Food, which is defending good, clean, and fair food.
artisanal honey: Honeys harvested by skilled beekeepers in limited quanties, using traditional methods, that have some common theme, but are not pure varietal or single source; for instance, spring honeys, summer honeys, and honeys from a particular location would all be artisanal honeys.
astringent: A honey that has a mouth feel of rough or dry, similar to the mouth feel of red wine or green and black teas.
balanced: Having a harmonious flavor profile.
beeswax: Technically, beeswax is a long chain fatty acid, composed simply of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few mineral compounds. Honey bees consume honey and special glands in their abdomens rearrange these molecules into a liquid, waxen-like product. This is expelled from the honey bee’s body through the gland openings and hardens when it hits the cooler air outside of the bee’s body. Beeswax is used to construct honeycomb to store honey in, to raise the young, and to provide a framework for the hive itself.
bitter: One of the five basic taste impressions; examples include grapefruit, greens, and coffee.
blended honey: Beekeepers can combine all the honeys their bees produced during the entire season and produce a single blend. Or, cheap tasteless honey can be blended with an expensive flavorful honey to produce a less expensive, less flavorful product. Or, sugar substitutes such as high fructose corn syrup, rice syrup, or even plain sugar can be added to honey to dilute its honey content and reduce the value.
bouquet: The total profile of an aroma.
bright: Having a flavor profile that is clean and clear to identify.
burnt: Flavor characteristic associated with the aroma of caramel or toasted notes.
buttery: Having a texture or flavor reminiscent of smooth butter.
camphorous: Having a flavor profile reminiscent of menthol or balsamic.
Carniolan bees: A race of bees that immigrated from the Italian peninsula to eastern European mountains. Springs are early and fast and these bees build populations rapidly in the spring and swarm early. However, they are also frugal and slow or stop brood production when resources are low to preserve their stores for leaner times.
chemical: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of solvent or industrial chemicals.
chunk honey: A jar of honey containing a piece of comb honey surrounded by liquid honey.
citrus: Pertaining to the flavor family that includes fruits like orange, lemon, lime, tangerine, and grapefruit.
comb honey: Honey that is just as the bees made it and stored it in the hive. The beekeeper removes the wax honeycomb containing the honey still covered with the wax cappings the bees applied, package it, and sell it as is. It is the most natural form of honey there is.
complex: A perception of being multilayered in terms of flavors and aromas.
COOL: Country Of Origin Label; a law under Title X of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 that requires retailers to provide the country of origin on the label. The goal of this law is for consumers to see where their food is coming from. It is essentially ignored by many food producers, honey importers often included.
creamed honey: Honey allowed to crystallize under controlled conditions of temperature and crystal size, added by the beekeeper.
creamy: Fine particles and viscosity of a honey that gives an impression of a smooth texture.
deep: A flavor profile that has rich layers of flavors.
delicate: A flavor that is subtle, light, and pleasant.
drones: Male honey bees. At the height of the season, the largest population of drones is in the hive, which may reach 750 to 1000. During poor weather, winter, or times of stress, the colony quits raising drones, may remove and destroy drone larvae or pupae, and even remove and kill adult drones.
dry: A flavor profile reminiscent of straw, hay, or tea.
egg: The first stage in complete metamorphosis. Honey bee eggs take about three days to turn into the next stage, the larvae.
European bees: Any of many races of bees that developed in the European continent that had originally migrated north from Africa, but migrated to extremes in environment and evolved behaviors and biologies to survive winters, droughts, and the like.
extracting: Honey bees store honey in the hexagonal-shaped cells they make of beeswax, secreted from glands in their abdomens. When the cells are full of honey that’s cured, they cover the cell with a thin layer of beeswax to protect it. These beeswax cells are contained in a rectangular wooden or plastic frame about an inch thick with cells of honey on both sides. To remove the honey, beekeepers place frames in an extracting machine, much like a lettuce spinner, spin the frames, and the honey moves out of the frames by centripetal force, leaving empty but reusable cells and frames and liquid honey at the bottom of the extractor.
fermentation: yeast, sugar, and water combine to make vinegar, and then alcohol. When honey, which is mostly sugar, has too much water (more that 18%) and contacts any of the many, many natural yeasts in the environment, alcohol forms. If the right amount of each is used, the result is a pleasant wine called mead. If the wrong amounts are used, the result is disgusting.
finish: The perceived taste a honey leaves behind after it is swallowed.
flash heating: Rapidly raising the temperature of honey in the microfiltering process to about 120 degrees F to 140 degrees F so it passes through filters rapidly and easily.
flavor profile: The total character of a honey as expressed in reference to aroma, taste, texture, and flavor.
floral: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of flowers or perfume.
foragers: Adult female honey bees who spend their time searching for and gathering nectar, pollen, water, and propolis.
fresh: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of camphorous cool rain or herbs, peppermint, lavender, or anise.
fructose: One of the six-carbon sugars the twelve-carbon sugar sucrose is broken down into when honey is made from floral nectar.
fruit: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of fruit. full-bodied: Rich and intense flavors; impressions that feel heavy in the mouth.
geographic indications: Certification that a product has certain specific sensory qualities, is produced according to traditional methods, or enjoys a unique reputation based upon its geographic origin.
GMO crops: Plants that have had their genes modified to add agricultural characteristics such as resistance to disease, toxins to kill pests, or resistance to herbicides.
goût de terroir: Taste of earth.
green: Grassy, vegetal notes reminiscent of unripened fruit.
guard bees: Adult honey bees that tend to hive defense. They may be at the front door, near the queen, at the top entrance, or anywhere an intruder may gain access. They have reached the age in which their bodies produce the most venom, and they react the fastest when alarm pheromone is released in the hive by other guards.
herbaceous: Typical flavors reminiscent of the aromatic, vegetal leaves of green herbs.
HFCS: High fructose corn syrup, a fructose sugar derived from corn either by adding chemicals to make the sucrose molecule break or enzymes to do the same; either way, it is not a natural product.
hoarding: The instinct that honey bees and some other bees have to continue to collect and store food long after they have enough to survive the drought/cold/wet/dearth season when no outside source of food is available.
hydroscopic: The property of a material to absorb moisture from the air. Honey is hydroscopic, so a jar of honey left open will absorb air moisture.
invasive plants: Many honey plants in the United States originated in other countries. As such, they have few natural enemies or controls and often grow unchallenged. This is good for beekeepers, but very often these invaders crowd out native plants and the wildlife that depends on them in a given area. They are definitely a mixed blessing.
Italian bees: A race of bees that immigrated from Africa to the Italian peninsula and adapted to the semitropical climate. They are known to be productive, gentle, and produce brood early and late in the season.
Langstroth, Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine: Known as the father of modern beekeeping. Developed the modern beehive with movable frames so beekeepers can easily manage their colonies and extract honey with minimal disturbance to the brood nest. Before the invention of the Lang-stroth hive, bees were kept in woven skeps or gum logs.
larva: The second stage of honey bee metamorphosis. This is similar to the caterpillar stage of butterflies and lasts different lengths of time for workers, drones, and queens.
local honey: How close is local? Some say the same county, some within 100 miles, and some even declare that within 400 miles is considered local. Ask where the honey was produced and decide for yourself.
log hives: The primary hive used by African beekeepers, it is simply a hollow log with the ends capped and hung in trees. Swarms move in, set up housekeeping until the dry season begins, and move on. Beekeepers harvest the remaining honey and rehang the hive.
microfiltered honey: Typical filtering technique for most commercial grade honey. Honey is flash heated to about 120 degrees F to 140 degrees F, forced through several filters to remove all particulate matter, wax flakes, dust, and pollen, and then flash cooled back to about 100 degrees F and bottled. This drives off some of the more volatile aromatics and certainly removes any particulate matter characteristics, but essentially leaves the honey unharmed.
mouth feel: A sensory attribute to a physical characteristic of food.
nectar: A liquid produced by plants that is rich in sugars and transported from the leaves where the sugar is formed to flowers. It is stored in nectaries or in extrafloral nectaries, often on the underside of leaves. Nectar, a rich carbohydrate, is the bribe flowers use to entice bees to visit and assist in pollination.
nurse bees: The youngest adult bees. For the first three to six days, their brood food glands are operating full bore and they tend to the young, the queen, and keep the house clean. Eventually, they age to become food handlers, guards, undertakers, and foragers.
palate: The range of an individual’s ability to recognize flavors.
palate fatigue: Also known as collapsed palate, the point at which a person can no longer experience tastes or flavors.
petal: Almost always the show part of a flower that attracts pollinators. Sometimes it’s not the petal but the sepal.
pistals: The female portion of the reproductive part of a plant, consisting of the pollen receptive area; the tube the pollen must traverse to reach the ovary so that union produces a seed.
pollen: The male portion of the reproductive process of plants, produced in the anthers, suspended above the flower by the stamens.
propolis: A resinous material honey bees gather from, primarily developing leaf buds, exuded by the buds to protect them from disease and insects. Bees gather this material, which can be many colors and contain differing proportions of a variety of materials, depending on the source. It has antimicrobial and antibacterial properties and bees use the substance to help sanitize their hives, to fill small spaces, and to smooth rough areas. It is soft and sticky in warm weather, but hard and brittle when it is cold. Beekeepers harvest this and process it for medicinal uses for humans.
pungent: Strong, spicy, hot, heady, sharp, biting.
pupa: The cocoon state of honey bee metamorphosis. When they reach this stage in their beeswax cell, they spin a thin cocoon and the cell is covered with a thin layer of beeswax by the house bees to protect the developing larvae, which in a few days emerge as adults.
queen: The only sexually complete female in the hive. She mates with ten to twenty or more drones shortly after she emerges as an adult, then begins a life of egg laying, pheromone production, and being attended to with great care by the nurse bees in the hive. This continues until she ages past a productive point, is injured, runs out of sperm from all those matings, becomes too old to produce pheromones, or, because of its success, the hive becomes large enough to divide itself and cast a swarm. About half the bees in the hive leave to form a new home, accompanied by the old queen. The remaining bees, of course, immediately raise a new queen and their colony continues as before.
raw honey: There is really no legal definition for raw honey, but there are many sort-of definitions. Basically, raw honey is not heated above 105 degrees F (the temperature of a desert hive), is not filtered at all, but is often strained to remove disagreeable debris developed in the extracting process. And that’s it. Not heated, not filtered. Raw.
refractometer: A simple machine that measures the percent of solids suspended in a liquid sample—the solids being sugars in the case of honey—thus a reading gives the moisture content (the remaining percent of the sample) of the product. Honey should contain less than 17.5% moisture to be stable.
Russian bees: A hybrid mix of several races of bees moved to the eastern portions of Russia as the Russians colonized that part of their country. They are partially Carniolan, Caucasian, Italian, German Black, and others. These were some of the first bees exposed to Varroa mites, so they have had the longest time to adapt and become resistant or tolerant of them in a hive. The U.S. Department of Agriculture imported several varieties and has been selecting those most resistant, productive, and gentle for U.S. beekeepers to use.
savory: One of the five basic tastes, also known as umami.
sensory evaluation: The process of tasting and using the senses to taste honey.
salty: One of the five basic tastes described as briny or brackish.
sour: One of the basic tastes, acid, lemon.
spicy: Food that has a piquant, hot, fiery, burning taste; spiced, zesty, peppery.
spoiled: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of fermentation, earthy, or yeasty.
sucrose: Common table sugar, and the most common sugar in floral nectar. When harvested by bees, an enzyme is added by the bees to break it into glucose and fructose sugars, which are digestible by bees and humans.
surplus: The amount of honey in excess of what the bees will need in times of dearth that is available to the beekeeper.
survivor: Any hybrid mix of honey bees that continues to thrive even when exposed to Varroa mites, extremes in weather, food shortages, and the like.
sweet: One of the five basic tastes, candied, sugary, saccharine.
tart: The perception of sour or acid on the taste buds, for example, lemon.
taste: The five taste impressions are sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami.
tasting notes: The sensory descriptions of honey.
terroir: The combination of characteristics of soil, location, and weather in any given region that affects honey plants, honey bees, and the honey harvest.
texture: The tactile quality of a honey as it feels in your mouth, also referred to as mouth feel.
thixotrophic: Honey that has a gel-like consistency until stirred, when it turns to liquid.
trans-shipping: Honey produced in one country, sent to a second country, fraudulently labeled as produced in the second country, and then exported to a third country to avoid tariffs or taxes.
umami: One of the five basic tastes, also known as savory.
uncapping: Removing the pure beeswax covering the cells filled with honey.
ultra-filtered honey: When honey is ultra-filtered, water is added to dilute the liquid, it is heated to near boiling, and then passed through ceramic filters with openings so small all proteins, pollen, particulate matter, some of the aroma, and larger sugar molecules and even some of the color molecules are removed. What remains is not honey, but rather a somewhat sweet syrup.
varietal honey: Often also called single source honey, it is honey collected from a hive by the beekeeper that was all collected from a single type of plant—orange blossoms only, for instance—a pure variety or single source.
vegetal: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of green or dried grass or tea.
viscosity: Mouth feel, the body or weight of honey on your tongue.
warm: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of burned, smoky, or nutty notes.
wild flower honey: A name often used when the beekeeper does not know the flowers the bees collected the honey from, blending in all manner of seasonal, artisanal, and even single source honeys in a single blend
woody: Aroma or flavor family reminiscent of wood bark or chips.