Czech forest (honeydew) honey
A dark honey that bees gather not from flowers but from honeydew, the sweet excretions of aphids and scale insects on spruce and fir. Spruce honeydew gives a reddish-brown honey, fir a dark brown to almost black one.
- Origin
- Czechia, conifer forests (including South Bohemia, Vysočina and the Plzeň region)
- Colour
- 110 mm · amber
- Season
- June – August
- Plant
- Picea abies, Abies alba + aphids (Cinara) and scale insects (Physokermes)
Colour varies by year and place; the value given is typical of the variety, not a measurement of one jar. Where a source describes the colour only in words (such as ‘light amber’), we convert it to the middle of the matching band of the Pfund scale, so the figure is approximate. The season follows the sources or, failing that, the flowering time of the plant in that area.
When honeydew is rich in the sugar melezitose, the honey sets solid in the comb as ‘cement honey’; beekeepers struggle to extract it and colonies risk running short of food in winter.