Despite the runaway success of Mānuka honey as a high-value export product in recent years, the rest of New Zealand’s honey types have tended to languish for want of definition and distinction, something the “Flower to Flavour” research project aims to change.
Bee researcher Dr Mark Goodwin says Mānuka has been clearly defined by its chemical characteristics to protect its value and provenance. The project aims to define more clearly what makes “pohutukawa”, “rewarewa” and others what they are.
This honey season he will be co-ordinating a small army across the country tasked with collecting bees and the flowers they have landed on, sending them back to his lab for analysis.
More precisely, he and a team consisting of volunteers and scientists will be extracting tiny amounts of honey-generating nectar from the collected bees’ crops for chemical unravelling, ultimately to define what honey it is they were creating in their final days of life.
“It is a delicate job, but a relatively simple one. The bees hold the nectar in crop, a little like what birds have. Gently squeezing it extracts the nectar, from which we will have analysis done to identify the chemical markers within that particular nectar.
“At present we cannot say exactly what flavours contribute to a particular honey.
“People make a ‘best guess’ take based on their previous tasting experience. Prior to the ’80s there were actually government-employed honey tasters who would go around sampling honey, determining what type it could be labelled as.”
Longtime Waikato beekeeper Jane Lorimer of the Beekeepers Association says the process of labelling honey based on its taste can be a fraught one.
“I have been beekeeping for 30 years and I still struggle to get the taste buds tuned in, and every year there can be a variation in what that taste actually is, depending upon the season, just as it can with grapes and wine.”
International standards require the pollen content of honey to be the determinant of its origin type, but often one is not indicative of the other.
“The problem with pollen analysis is some flowers put huge amounts of pollen into their nectar, and some do not. It is the liquid part of the nectar, and the chemicals found within it that determine honey’s taste, not the pollen itself,” says Goodwin.
He says researchers are very confident that the nectar harvested from the sacrificial bees will represent the main nectar type collected by them.
“Bees are very specific about what flower they concentrate on when collecting nectar. The nectar will be collected from 300-400 flowers per bee, and of all the research I have ever done only one lone bee has ever gone between two different flower types when collecting – they stick to one type.”
Spectrograph analysis will identify the chemical profile of the particular nectar, pointing to the unique chemical markers for each particular flower type, and therefore what defines that honey.
Goodwin said ultimately the work will deliver beekeepers and processors a chemical profile that defines the likes of “rewarewa” or “pohutukawa” honey. This will make it easier to market their particular type with confidence, and ultimately offer a means of protecting each type with scientific backing.
“The model we compare it to is coffee. Where we once used to buy coffee as a tin of Greggs instant, now you can select from an array of different coffees, all defined by their source and flavour. We sell a lot of honey we call ‘multi-floral’, but there is a whole story to tell beyond that.”
A second phase project will be finding a vocabulary to describe the honeys, similar to what the wine industry has done so successfully.
“We can start talking about district, year, flavour, all those things wine does using over 200 words to describe flavour alone – and honey has a much greater breadth of tastes than wine does.”
Lorimer and Goodwin are working to raise the army of volunteers they need to collect at least 30 bees and their flowers each this season.
Ultimately, he hopes to have nectar samples from 400,000 flowers. Volunteers will be supplied with a chilly bin to place collected bees and flowers in, as well as bags and instructions.
“It is really an exercise in citizen science. While we want beekeepers to be involved, we are also keen to have enthusiasts and groups engaged. This is a chance to really write a whole new area of value into the industry,” he says.
Interested parties can contact Goodwin on honeycharacterisationproject@gmail.com
