Honeydew honey is honey made not from flower nectar but from the sweet excretions of sap-sucking insects like aphids and scale insects. Bees collect this sugary liquid, called honeydew, from the surfaces of trees and process it the same way they would nectar. The result is a distinctly dark, richly flavored honey prized across Europe, Turkey, and New Zealand, with a mineral and antioxidant profile that sets it apart from the floral honeys most people are familiar with.
How Honeydew Honey Is Made
The process starts with tiny insects, mainly aphids, scale insects, and adelgids, that pierce leaves, needles, or bark to feed on a plant’s sap. These insects extract the nutrients they need but excrete a sugar-rich fluid as waste. That fluid coats leaves, branches, and needles in a sticky layer. Honeybees forage on this residue just as they would on nectar from a flower, carrying it back to the hive where they reduce its moisture and store it as honey.
The Codex Alimentarius, the international food standards body, formally defines honeydew honey as honey that “comes mainly from excretions of plant sucking insects (Hemiptera) on the living parts of plants or secretions of living parts of plants.” This means it can also include sugary exudates that trees themselves produce, though insect secretions are the primary source in commercial production.
Key Insects and Tree Sources
Different insect species produce honeydew on different trees, and these pairings give each regional honeydew honey its character. In Greece and Turkey, pine honey production depends heavily on a single scale insect called Marchalina hellenica, which feeds on pine trees and has even been deliberately introduced to new regions to boost honey yields. Across Central Europe, several species of Cinara aphids feed on silver fir and spruce, creating the basis for the dark “forest honey” popular in Germany, Austria, and Slovenia.
The major host trees include fir, spruce, pine, oak, beech, and chestnut. In Slovenia and neighboring countries, spruce and fir honeydew honeys are recognized as premium single-source products that command higher market prices than many floral varieties. In New Zealand, the Giant Willow Aphid produces a honeydew that bees collect from willow trees, creating a distinctive local variety.
What Makes the Sugar Profile Different
Floral honeys are dominated by the simple sugars glucose and fructose, with relatively small amounts of more complex sugars. Honeydew honey contains those same simple sugars but also carries significantly higher levels of unusual complex sugars that form during digestion inside the sap-sucking insects. Tree sap typically contains only sucrose, but by the time it passes through an aphid or scale insect, it has been transformed into a range of compounds including melezitose, erlose, raffinose, and other multi-part sugars not normally found in blossom honey.
The concentration of these complex sugars varies dramatically depending on which insect produced the honeydew. One Cinara species feeding on spruce can produce honeydew that is 48% melezitose by sugar weight, while another species on the same tree produces only 2%. This variability is part of what makes honeydew honey so diverse from batch to batch and region to region.
The Cement Honey Problem
High melezitose content creates a well-known challenge for beekeepers. When melezitose levels in honey reach roughly 8 to 22%, the honey can crystallize rapidly and turn rock-hard inside the comb. Beekeepers call this “cement honey” or “concrete honey” because it becomes nearly impossible to extract using standard methods. This represents a real financial loss, particularly in New Zealand, Switzerland, and Australia, where certain aphid species produce honeydew with melezitose levels as high as 27% in the finished honey. The crystals lock the honey into the wax comb, and no amount of gentle warming can easily release it.
Mineral Content and Electrical Conductivity
One of the simplest ways to distinguish honeydew honey from blossom honey is to measure its electrical conductivity, which reflects mineral concentration. Honeydew honeys consistently measure above 0.8 milliSiemens per centimeter, while most blossom honeys fall below that threshold. This cutoff is used as an official classification tool in international honey standards.
Potassium accounts for about 80% of the minerals in honey overall, followed by magnesium at around 9% and iron at 3%. Honeydew varieties contain substantially more of these minerals than floral honeys, which is part of why they taste less sweet and more complex. Some honeydew honeys have been measured with electrical conductivity values averaging 1,734 microSiemens per centimeter, more than double the classification threshold.
Antioxidant Activity
Honeydew honey consistently outperforms most blossom honeys in measures of antioxidant compounds. In a study comparing Spanish honeys across multiple floral and honeydew types, honeydew varieties had the highest levels of phenolic compounds, the plant-derived molecules responsible for much of honey’s antioxidant activity. Honeydew honeys also contained more than twice the flavonoid content of most blossom honeys, with values above 1.5 milligrams per gram compared to 0.5 to 0.8 milligrams per gram for typical floral types.
Heather honey was the only blossom honey that matched honeydew honey’s antioxidant performance, with both types showing similar overall antioxidant capacity of around 1 milligram equivalent per gram. For most other floral honeys, the gap was significant. The darker color of honeydew honey is itself a rough indicator of this higher antioxidant load, since the same compounds that scavenge free radicals also absorb light and deepen the color.
Flavor, Color, and Texture
Honeydew honey is typically dark amber to nearly black, with a flavor profile that leans toward malty, woody, or resinous rather than the bright sweetness of clover or acacia honey. It is generally less sweet-tasting despite having a similar total sugar content, because those complex sugars register differently on the palate than simple glucose and fructose.
The texture tends to stay liquid longer than many blossom honeys, with one important exception: varieties high in melezitose can crystallize aggressively, as described above. When crystallization does happen in a controlled way outside the comb, the resulting texture is often fine-grained and spreadable. Moisture content must stay below 20% to meet international standards, the same limit that applies to most other honeys.
Where Honeydew Honey Is Most Popular
Honeydew honey has a strong market identity in parts of Europe where forest beekeeping has deep traditions. In Slovenia, beekeepers monitor spruce and fir honeydew flows using networks of hive scales at 50 to 70 locations across the country, treating honeydew seasons with the same precision that other regions apply to specific flower blooms. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Greece all have established consumer demand for forest or pine honey.
Turkey is one of the world’s largest producers of pine honeydew honey, relying on the Marchalina hellenica scale insect that thrives on Turkish pine forests along the Aegean coast. New Zealand has developed a niche market for its willow-based honeydew honey, though the cement honey problem limits production volumes. In countries without a strong honeydew tradition, like the United States, this type of honey remains relatively obscure but is increasingly available through specialty retailers.