Dark honey comes from flowers with darker nectar or honeydew, with popular examples including Buckwheat, Chestnut, Avocado, Spotted Gum, Banksia, and Tulip Poplar, often having strong flavors and high antioxidant levels, with some, like buckwheat, being almost black, while others like Manuka also provide dark color and unique properties.
Buckwheat, chestnut, tulip poplar and knotweed honey can all be very dark.
Different flowers produce nectar with different colours and flavours, resulting in a wide range of honey colours. Here in Australia some examples of lighter coloured honey include acacia, clover and orange honey. Some examples of darker coloured honey include banksia and buckwheat honey.
If you are asking yourself, “What makes honey dark in color?” it can either happen naturally because of the plants the bees foraged from. Or it can happen naturally as honey ages.
Each plant's nectar has different minerals and molecules that change the color of the honey it produces. For the Zygurzynski bees, flower trees including black locust, tulip poplar, and basswood make summer honey with a light golden color. In the fall, dark brown honey comes from knotweed and goldenrod nectar.
In a quiet corner of North Carolina, bees produce a violet-hued honey so rare and unpredictable that even experts can't explain it – and that's what makes it magical.
The "3 feet, 3 miles rule" is a beekeeping guideline for moving hives: move them less than 3 feet (so they find the new spot easily using landmarks and scent) or more than 3 miles (so they're forced to reorient to a completely new landscape). Moving them an intermediate distance (e.g., 50 feet to 2 miles) confuses forager bees, causing them to return to the old, empty location and get lost.
Honey gets its color from the pollen that a hive gathers to make it. Because plants blossom at different times of year and bees collect honey nearly year-round, a single hive can produce radically different colors of honey from season to season.
Some darker varieties of honey include buckwheat, blackbutt, wildflower, thyme, dandelion, jarrah, chestnut, meadow, and manuka honey, many of which contain a high concentration of antioxidants and other powerful nutrients.
Changes in honey's color or texture, like darkening or crystallization, are natural and don't mean it's spoiled; it's still safe to eat and can be returned to its liquid state with gentle heating.
Lavender honey (Lavandula latifolia) is white to amber in colour; sometimes a little darker if it contains honeydew.
The 7/10 rule in beekeeping is a guideline for when to add a new box (super) to a hive, suggesting you add it when bees have built comb, brood, or stored honey on 7 out of 10 frames in the current box, indicating they need more space and preventing congestion, which can lead to swarming. This proactive expansion supports the colony's growth, reduces stress, and maintains natural hive behavior, but it's also important to consider factors like time of year and overall hive health, not just frame count.
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Lighter-colored varieties may appear slightly cloudy, while darker varieties like buckwheat might show more pronounced opacity. This natural cloudiness should not be confused with fermentation, which would present as unusual bubbling or separation. Rather, it should appear as a consistent haziness throughout the honey.
For starters, kudzu and purple honey (sometimes called blue honey) share a geographical distribution in the southeast, whereas blueberries and elderberries are found everywhere. Also, purple honey is said to taste like grape jam and smell like grape soda—descriptions that are often applied to kudzu flowers as well.
Varroa Mites are the #1 enemy of honey bee and beekeepers around the world. These external parasites feed on the blood of adult honey bees, and reproduce on honey bee pupae. They can considerably weaken individual bees, and often vector viruses and other pathogens between bees.
Autumn flowers for bees include aster, ragweed, knotweed, mountain mint, black-eyed Susans, phlox, autumn sedum, Queen Anne's lace, and Joe Pye weed. This nectar is often darker, so fall honey is typically a deep amber brown. However, time of year is not the only cause of different-colored honey.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, honey has been divided into seven color classes. These classes are: Water White, Extra White, White, Extra Light Amber, Light Amber, Amber, and Dark Amber.
Buckwheat honey is made from bees collecting pollen and nectar from the buckwheat flowers when they are in bloom. They are actually a white flower and the bees make black honey with it. Buckwheat honey is super dark and strong in taste.
Buckwheat flowers produce nectar with higher levels of antioxidants and minerals compared to other flowers, which contribute to the honey's distinct dark coloration.
Darker honey is higher in antioxidants, richer in minerals. It may not be as sweet, but is still really good! It may cost a little more but it's worth it.
The causes of darkening in honey have been attributed to Maillard reaction, fructose caramelization and reactions of polyphenols, however, no systematic studies exist on this subject.
Simply incorporate scents that humans find pleasant and bees find repulsive. Some of these off-putting fragrances are peppermint, spearmint, eucalyptus, and thyme.
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Bounce & Slide
But no matter what the hive style, I always bounce or slide the hive components as I put them back together. When you lower a frame back into the hive, for example, do so slowly and as you get close to making contact with the box, gently bounce the frame up and down so any bees in the way can move.