Do different species of honey make different tasting honey?

Question

Do different types of honey bees make different tasting honey? Are they the only insect that makes honey?

Answer 1

No necessarily different types of bees but what pollen they are using will determine what the honey tastes like.

Answer 2

Basically, only honey bees (the genus Apis) produces honey. Some other species produce something that is called honey but it has very different properties.
In the production of honey by honeybees, the determining factor is the flowers to which the bees go. You can get wheat honey, which is a much darker and slightly less sweet variety than wildflower honey. Actually, you can get honey made from specific flowers - see the second web site! The honey basically comes from the flowers' nectar.

Answer 3

There are several kinds of honey bee, and many other social bees such as the bumblebees. Then there are hundreds and hundreds of solitary bees.

All of them make honey.

Don't know if sure if the flavour varies according to the bee -- I expect it does a bit. However, I'd have thought that this was minor compared with the big variations in flavour of the nectar. Every plant, or group of plants, produces nectar with different flavours and different mixtures of sugars, and these affect the flavour and physical characters of the honey. Some sugars crystalise easily, leading to the hard white honey from rape (canola), mustard or ivy. Others hardly crystalise at all, giving syrupy honey. Most honey is of course from mixed nectars.

One kind my bees make in autumn here (New Forest, southern England) is honey from ling heather (Calluna vulgaris). This is a deliciously flavoured syrupy honey which sets to a jelly, except when just stirred up.

Honey can occasionally be made from honeydew rather than nectar -- this is the sticky "urine" of aphids. As honey is essentially bee-sick, this kind of honey is therefore greenfly-p*ss bee-sick... Apparently it's quite good, very dark brown and strongly flavoured -- I've never had the chance to try it. I wonder if it tastes like aphids, which are quite nice...

Answer 4

Different taste of the honey comes from the different flowers, not the species of the bees.

Sorry that I can't help you with the second part of the question.

Answer 5

i guess you can say that.
the difference in the taste of the honey comes from the flowers they gather the honey from.
so the honey gathered by the bees that live in mountains or hilltops is going to taste different than honey produced by bees that we rear, basically because the flowers that grow in higher altitudes are not going to be the same as the ones grow locally.
same with bees that live in different climatic conditions. the bees may be of same species or different species, but the flavourof the honey they gather is entirely dependent on the flowers they are able to find.

Answer 6

No, the difference in taste is due to the types of pollen gathered by the bees. For instance, bees in an orange grove who mainly use orange flowers will have a distinct orangey taste to the honey.

Answer 7

Some excellent answers here. I just want to add that in addition to bees, there are a few others species of insect that make honey as well.

Honey-pot ants, for example, which instead of storing the honey in wax honeycombs actually have individual worker ants that have hugely distended abdomens that store large quantities of honey.

Answer 8

i think yes!! different bees makes different honey.