Best African Honey Types
The district of Bore is located in the Ethiopian Guji highlands, home to the eponymous indigenous community. Apart from honey, which is used as a food, a medicine, and an ingredient used to prepare beverages such as mead (locally known as boka), the indigenous people also farm cattle and grow grains and legumes.
The honey is produced by bees during the rainy season which lasts around 7 months each year, resulting in lots of flowers. The bees make two types of honey in their traditional hives called gagura – white honey and dark, amber-colored honey.
The highlands of Ethiopia’s northernmost region of Tigray are the home of Tigray white honey. This honey variety is typically collected between September and December, at the end of the rainy season, but it can also be gathered for a second time from May to June, depending on the amount of annual rainfall.
White, red, and yellow are the three different types of honey produced by the bees in this region, with the white variety accounting for almost 90% of the total yield. Tigray white honey has an uneven, granular texture, good consistency, and a beautiful bright white color.
Expansion of deforested areas and pollution in Tanzania’s Arusha region have contributed to a drastic reduction of the high-yielding, naturally-occurring stingless bee honey in hives within dry tree trunks, bushes, trees, and holes in the ground.
Living in difficult conditions, a group of women from the village of Ngurdoto, located on the slopes of Mount Meru, have organized themselves into an association called Umangu, and decided to reintroduce the production of this honey in the region.
Spending their days in the Mau forest and other forests near Mount Elgon, the Ogiek people are one of the oldest tribes of Kenya whose life is based on natural resources from the forest. Their main activity is beekeeping, but some tribe members also raise animals and grow crops.
In order to collect the honey, traditional cylindrical hives made from red cedar are first hung from tall trees, and the men then use vines to climb the trees and burn dry moss which smokes the hives, while the women manage the lower hives situated on the ground. Ogiek honey is produced by small black African honey bees, who prefer the nectar of the Dombeya goetzeni plant’s flowers.
Produced in the area of Wenchi volcano in the Ethiopian Oromia region, this honey is gathered between October and December, at the end of the rainy season. The honey comes from traditional cylindrical hives, made with a combination of bamboo, banana-like leaves, wood, and straw.
The bees in the area are quite aggressive, so the beekeepers collect the honey exclusively at nighttime, using smoke in the process, which somewhat compromises the quality of the product. After the honey has been extracted with a wooden spatula, a knife, and a bowl, it is brought to the village while still in its hive.
Rira honey is produced in Rira village in the Ethiopian region of Oromia by the Arsi-Oromo people. They hang the hives on the highest tree branches of trees such as Cordia africana, Hagenia, and Podocarpus. The hives are traditionally made with a combination of bamboo, vines, and straw.
The bees make this unique honey from the nectar of different plants such as garamba, badesa, gale, and heto. It is this biodiversity that makes Rira honey unique and medicinally valuable. The honey is collected between April and May, at the end of the rainy season, only during the night, because African bees are very aggressive so appropriate clothing and skilled use of smoke are a necessity.
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