5 Honey Varieties from Türkiye

A miracle of bees, honey is a valuable food with high nutritional value, enjoyed by everyone from seven to seventy in every region of Türkiye with its addictive taste! The honey varieties with different aromas and properties find their place in our diet, from breakfast tables to various food and beverage recipes. Watch out the bees and get ready to go on a journey looking for Türkiye’s top honey varieties, each sweeter than the other.

Pine Honey

To start with Pine honey, it is a sweet and spicy honey with woody undernotes, blessed by a resinous scent and a darkish amber hue. It’s a quite popular Turkish breakfast meal, often served with toast and poured over the tasty Turkish yogurt. This special honey type is unique because it is produced by honeydew-collecting bees. Türkiye produces a whopping 92% of the world's pine honey!

Flower Honey

Flower honey takes its place proudly among the most popular and widely available honey varieties in Türkiye. It is made from nectar gathered straight from flowers by worker bees. You’ll see it in every breakfast table that usually comes with a dollop of clotted cream, which is another Turkish breakfast specialty. Buy some Turkish flower honey and mix it with some Tahini to enjoy a slightly sweet and healthy snack.

Chestnut Honey

Coming from the very heart of the Black Sea region, chestnut honey follows the list of top Turkish honey varieties. It is made from the chestnut trees that bloom for once in a fortnight in June, which makes this variety extremely unique and special. It’s more commonly utilized for its therapeutic uses in order to fight the symptoms of asthma and respiratory diseases. It also makes you more energetic, giving you high spirits and cleaning your bad breath.

Thyme Honey

The strong taste of thyme is blended with a unique honey flavour. This one of a kind honey variety is produced with the nectar from the blooms of the thyme plant that is only available between the months of May and August. Preserving a golden yellow hue, this honey variety evokes the bright scent of tropical fruits that give it a distinct slightly spicy flavour. The unique taste of this honey variety will be etched on your memory forever!

Sunflower Honey

Türkiye’s Thrace region yields this intriguing honey variety. Oily sunflowers attract bees and they are difficult to overlook since they are huge and features bright colours. As any hazardous chemicals from the earth are preserved in the stem, only goodness stays in the bloom. It has an intensely pleasing taste and leaves a strong sugar aroma after you taste it. Having a smooth flowing texture, it has a mild scent of sunflower blooms. It is one of the sweetest varieties within our list. It’s not only good for your stomach but also for your health! Due to its antiseptic and antibacterial features, it can be used to cure sore throat, colds, and influenza.

Bonus: Mad Honey

The dark, crimson "mad honey," known literally as Deli Bal in Türkiye’s Black Sea region is not originally in our list yet its intriguing background story gives it a privilege to be told about. It includes Grayanotoxin, a natural neurotoxin derived from rhododendron nectar that causes light-headedness and, in rare cases, even hallucinations! It is also very crucial that this special variety of honey can only be consumed in very small quantities, otherwise it might poison you! Despite the pitfalls and the risks, Turkish Mad Honey can be the most intriguing name among the aforementioned varieties and it has drawn many “honey detectives” and researches from all around the world to Türkiye.