Fluid rather than liquid, food more willingly than drink, this miracle confection carries less than a fifth of its volume as water. A golden adamantine lustre radiates from the clear viscous preserve that distinguishes it as honey. By analysis rather than taste, it is surprisingly more acidic than alkaline. The rich sugary concentrate is mountain high in fructose, glucose and sucrose blended with other less common sweeteners such as honeydew. Collectively, sugars make up four fifths of honey, which is manufactured from the nectar of wild flowers, foraged by honeybees.
Honey is best taken from a spoon, spread on a scone, a soldier of warm toast, or a slice of freshly baked bread. Delivery to the tongue brings a startlingly fresh, earthy, organic sweetness accompanied by a delicate wild floral fragrance to delight the nostrils. The taste buds ring out, in indefinite pitch, as a full orchestra of triangles tingle from the back of the throat to the inner ear. Soothing, sensuous, mild convulsions accompany swallowing, made easy by a watering mouth. The slow, rippling flavour is warm and seductive reaching downward from the sedated larynx to the hungry belly. The shoulders lift and roll, as the jowls round into the Buddha’s smile, like the edge of a white cloud rolling along on a warm, blue summer sky.
In the unified order of the landscape, beyond the crystal clear waters of the rippling lough and the forest on the far shore, mountains are etched like triangles in the distance. Bold, regal, aquiline, the silhouettes are painted in multitudes of seasonal colours, tones, and hues - changing by the day, the hour and the minute. John O’Donoghue once wrote, “Light never picks the same mountain twice.”
The uplifting, sheer faces of the mountain peaks are broken with outcrops of smoky grey sandstone shaded with wrinkles of dark, shadowy relief. The velvet green heath land mosses and grasses are now punctuated with yellow gorse and the red berries of the holly and mountain ash. It is autumn and the living greens are giving way to dying yellows. The fern, already dead, crisp and dry donates to the canvas rustic browns and fiery oranges, before decomposing into nutrient to sponsor next season’s growth.
Ancient trout dart between the polished stones in narrow sparkling streams that fall from grooves and tumble into bog land clearings where the flowering heather, Calluna, emerges in late summer sunshine to provide a carpet of bright purple hue much loved by honeybees. Each the size of a small coin, twenty to thirty thousand black and yellow flying insects navigate invisible corridors in the sky, making a bee-line to the heather and a flight path back to the hive. Here worker bees pack the regurgitated nectar into perfectly geometric fibre cells, their delicate wings hovering incessantly to evaporate water from the nectar, inhibiting fermentation and facilitating long-term preserve.
Nectar from heather makes distinctive honey with a stronger flavour and firmer texture. The jelly-like substance is hard to remove from the honeycomb and for this reason alone, it is often sold as comb honey intact in the waxy cellular comb rather than clear glass jars into which it is extracted by the beekeeper that rates comb honey as the best.
The name Nectar is derived from the Latin word nectar, which means “drink of the gods”. It can be further traced to the Greek word néktar a compound of nek meaning “death” and tar “overcoming”. The medicinal and culinary uses of honey can be traced back thousands of years. Preserved residues of edible honey have even been found in the tombs of pharaohs.
As winter approaches, the bees work harder and faster to stockpile their harvest. With each successive journey to the mountain, along the same beeline path, the beacon of dying yellow grows and turns amber, the colour of freshly made honey.
Who but the great designer, the one of infinite resource, could compose such a metaphor?