'Ohi'a Lehua
The sacred and endemic ‘Ohi’a Lehua tree flower is one of the most beautiful nectar-producing plants in the Hawaiian Islands. It produces a golden, delicate honey, with a smooth buttery-floral flavor.
Honey Varietals
Most of the honey available on supermarket shelves is a blended mix of different honeys and also heavily processed. This gives most people the perception that all honey tastes relatively the same.
However, much of honey's flavor comes from the nectar that bees collect from flowering plants, and there are incredible number of flowering plants that bees frequent, each lending the resulting honey unique colors, flavors, and texture. When we taste honey that hasn't been heavily processed, these qualities come through much more clearly.
Bees rarely only visit one kind of flower, so most honey is technically what we'd call polyfloral, but beekeepers are able to place hives so that the large majority of the nectar collected comes from a single plant source, giving us monofloral, or varietal, honey. This is what's meant when you come across a honey that's named after a single plant, like "Orange Blossom Honey". Both polyfloral and monofloral honeys are delicious, but monofloral will give off the most distinguishable tasting notes, both when you taste the honey, and when you taste a mead made from it!
Below you'll find a list of honey varietals, which is comprehensive, but not complete: