“Do you have acacia honey? What about chestnut honey?”
It is a question we are often asked by people discovering our honey for the first time. And understandably so: acacia and chestnut are probably among the best-known varieties of honey and the ones many people are accustomed to looking for.
Our answer, however, is no. Le Terre dei Maghi has chosen not to produce monofloral honey.
This is not a consequence of the land where we work, nor is it a recent decision. It is a choice we made from the very beginning, when our beekeeping project was still taking shape, and over time it has become one of the fundamental principles behind the way we keep bees and think about honey.
A choice that grew with our project
When we first became interested in beekeeping, we attended courses, studied and gained experience in other beekeepers’ apiaries. We needed to learn, observe people with more experience than us, understand the techniques involved and discover a world far more complex than it might appear from the outside.
As our knowledge grew, however, we began to notice something that did not quite sit comfortably with us. On the one hand, we were learning just how important bees are to the environment: not only as pollinators, but as an essential part of ecosystems and valuable indicators of what is happening in the land where they live. On the other, we were discovering a form of beekeeping that, understandably, must also deal with production requirements and a market in which consumers tend to know and ask for particular types of honey.
Acacia, chestnut and other monofloral honeys have distinctive characteristics, and many people seek them out precisely for that reason. We certainly do not believe that they are less valuable or of lower quality. We simply came to understand that this was not the path we wanted to follow.
We had chosen beekeeping out of passion, with the aim of protecting bees and maintaining as respectful a relationship as possible between the hive, the beekeeper and the land. From this came another decision: not to pursue, at all costs, a honey with predetermined characteristics, but instead to accept what the bees and each season would give us.
We do not chase the blossoms
Our apiaries are located in Villagrossa, in the municipality of Calice al Cornoviglio, at an altitude of more than 500 meters, in the landscape where the hills gradually give way to the mountains. Our apiaries are permanent. We do not practice migratory beekeeping and we do not move our hives from one area to another in pursuit of different blooms.
The bees remain in their own territory and, day after day, explore whatever nature makes available to them. This also means accepting that what they find will never be exactly the same, because no two seasons are ever identical.
Spring may arrive late, or it may be cold and exceptionally rainy. A sudden snowfall may damage a bloom just as it begins. A particularly hot and dry summer may drastically reduce the amount of nectar available. The following year, in exactly the same place and with the same hives, conditions may be completely different.
All of this affects what flowers, when it flowers and how much nectar the plants are able to produce. As a result, the honey changes too. And that is precisely why we like to think that each of our harvests tells the story of both a place and a season.
Why we do not harvest at the end of a particular bloom
There is another reason, even more important to us, behind our decision not to pursue monofloral production. It has to do with the moment when honey is harvested.
Producing honey strongly characterized by a particular flower requires careful attention to when the honey supers are removed, before subsequent blooms can alter the characteristics of the harvest.
Take acacia, for example. In our area, it flowers later than it does near the coast and its bloom lasts for a relatively short period. Once it ends, other flowers may quickly take its place: cherry, bramble and the many wild plants growing around our apiaries.
If our aim were necessarily to produce acacia honey, we would therefore need to remove the honey supers before nectar from the next blooms became part of the harvest. At that point, however, we would have to ask ourselves a question that matters more to us than the particular variety of honey we are trying to obtain: Is that honey really ready to be harvested?
And this is where our approach to beekeeping takes a different path.
We wait for the bees to tell us when the honey is ready
Inside the hive, bees carry out a long and complex process to transform the nectar they have gathered into honey and prepare it for storage. When the contents of a cell have reached the right conditions, the bees seal it with a thin layer of wax. The cell is then said to be capped.
We have chosen to respect this process and harvest our honey supers when the combs are fully capped. It may sound like a small technical detail, but to us it means much more. It means accepting that the timing of the harvest is not determined solely by the flowering calendar or by the type of honey we would like to produce.
We prefer to wait until the bees themselves show us that their work is complete and that the honey is ready to be stored — and therefore harvested. This means we do not need to collect it prematurely and then resort to artificial dehumidification.
In the meantime, of course, another bloom may begin and the bees may bring a different nectar into the hive. We do not see this as something that needs to be corrected. That new nectar will simply become part of the harvest and help make it what it truly is: honey born in that particular place, during that particular season.
Multifloral does not mean “just any honey”
This is perhaps one of the ideas we care most about explaining. The term multifloral honey is still sometimes perceived almost as a residual category: if a honey cannot be identified as acacia, chestnut, linden or another recognizable monofloral variety, then it is simply considered multifloral.
We see it very differently. For us, multifloral honey may offer the most complete expression of the land in which our bees live, because a single jar can contain nectar from many different blooms, in proportions that vary according to the place, the moment of harvest and, above all, the way the season has unfolded.
These combinations are what create colors, aromas, textures and flavors that can never be perfectly reproduced the following year. One honey may be lighter or darker, more delicate or intensely aromatic. It may crystallize at a different rate or develop a different texture. We do not try to correct these differences in order to obtain the same result year after year. We consider them part of the value of the honey itself.
And this is also why someone tasting one of our honeys for the first time may discover something very different from what they expected.
Accepting that nature does not produce to order
Naturally, this choice has consequences. Our production is limited, and not all of our honeys are available at all times or in every season, because some years are generous while others are far less favorable.
A bloom we had high hopes for may be damaged by a cold or rainy spring. Heat and drought may severely reduce the availability of nectar during summer. Living and working at more than 500 meters above sea level, these differences can be particularly pronounced.
We therefore cannot know in advance how much honey we will harvest, nor can we promise that a particular honey will be available again the following year in the same quantity or with exactly the same characteristics.
We have chosen to accept this unpredictability because, for us, beekeeping also means recognizing that nature is not a production process that can be programmed. We can observe our colonies, care for them and intervene when their well-being requires it. But we do not want to expect every season to produce the same quantity of honey or exactly the same harvest.
Our choices come before quantity
It would probably be easier to produce what the market already knows and asks for. But we have one important freedom: we chose to keep bees first and foremost out of passion, and we do not depend on the quantity of honey we are able to sell. This allows us not to make yield the main criterion when deciding how our hives should be managed.
We can wait until the honey is fully mature even when harvesting earlier might be commercially more convenient. We can accept a smaller harvest. And we can accept that a particular honey may sell out and remain unavailable until the bees and the season allow us to produce it again.
We do not consider this a limitation to hide. It is simply the consequence of the way we have chosen to work, placing honey quality and respect for the bees’ natural rhythms ahead of the need for a uniform product that is always available.
When someone comes back
At first, there can be a little surprise. People who arrive asking for acacia or chestnut honey often do not yet know how we work. It is up to us to explain why we have made certain choices and why our honey may be different from what they are used to buying.
Then comes the tasting, probably our favorite moment. It often happens that someone trying our honey for the first time is surprised by an aroma, a texture or a flavor they were not expecting — and that surprise turns into appreciation.
But the greatest satisfaction comes when that person returns and asks for our honey again. Not so much because it means selling a few more jars, but because in that simple gesture we see something far more important: our work and the choices behind it have been understood and appreciated.
Perhaps it would be easier to produce what the market already knows and expects. We have chosen another path: to wait, observe and accept that every year may be different from the one before.
Because in the end, we do not want to decide in advance what kind of honey our bees should produce. We prefer to let the bees, the land and the seasons tell us — one harvest at a time.