Forest Honey
Lexikon
According to the guidelines for honey, forest honey is a honeydew honey that comes entirely from plants in the forest, with parks in towns explicitly not counting as forest.
According to the guidelines for honey, forest honey is a honeydew honey that comes entirely from plants in the forest, with parks in towns explicitly not counting as forest. In everyday language, forest honey is the common umbrella term for honey that the bees have obtained mainly from the sugary honeydew of aphids and similar insects on trees, and in Germany above all conifers such as spruce and fir play a major role as hosts of these lice.
Typical of forest honey are a strong, tangy taste, a darker color ranging from amber to dark brown, and a particularly high mineral content, which comes from the trace elements from the trees' phloem sap contained in honeydew. Chemically, this shows up among other things in a considerably higher electrical conductivity compared with blossom honey, which is why conductivity also serves as a criterion for distinguishing the two types of honey.
For beekeepers, forest honey depends heavily on the forage, because it only comes about when the honeydew-producing lice multiply in sufficient numbers, which in turn depends on the weather and the health of the trees, so that there are years with an abundant forest flow and years with practically none. In addition, some forest honeys tend to crystallize quickly and hard because of their melezitose content, up to so-called cement honey, which requires particular care during extraction and bottling.