“Forget the wine snobs who tell you that what they drink is the essence of the country. Honey is more than that: it is the truest distillation of the landscape, as specific to a place as the way sun-light hits flowers in the morning.”
“Pure honey, honey treasured and nourished and definitive of its own place and time, honey drawn from a single hive or hives in a single field, offers a lesson in the vital difference between flowers that grow in sand or in loam, those that get sun in the morning versus the ones that see only a little light in the afternoon.
That kind of honey is an element, as clean as oxygen.
Although it all goes by the same name, honey that started off as, say, orange blossoms, is nothing at all like honey made from the nectar of wildflowers, or from the fragile blue of desert lavender or just-after-dawn gold of catsclaw. Even honey from the same species of plant can look and taste vastly different—clover honey ranges from pale to gold so deep that it seems like it’s trying to hide the secrets of its miraculous flavour.”
From A Short History of the Honey Bee: Humans, Flowers, and Bees in the Eternal Chase for Honey by E. Readicker-Henderson
