Weird honeys you can actually eat: barnyard funk to insect juice

Let’s begin with the tasting note no one wants to see on a breakfast menu: barnyard.

This refers to buckwheat honey, a dark, strong honey made from buckwheat flowers. Thankfully, it is not dung related. In tasting language, ‘barnyard’ means earthy, rustic and a little funky: hay, toasted grain, leather, molasses, dark malt or the smell of a clean stable.

It can be dark amber to almost black, with a flavour closer to stout, black tea or treacle than flowers.

Honeydew honey is the one that makes everyone at the table put down their spoon and ask, “Sorry, what?”

Despite the name, it has nothing to do with honeydew melon. Bees make it from honeydew: a sugary liquid left behind by sap-sucking insects such as aphids. These insects feed on plant sap, secrete sweet droplets and bees collect those droplets instead of flower nectar.

Like buckwheat honey, it’s usually darker, less floral and more savoury than regular blossom honey. It can taste woody, malty, resinous, herbal or slightly bitter. You may see versions sold as forest honey, pine honey or fir honey.

After barnyard and insect honey, meadowfoam honey arrives like a fluffy dessert trolley.

Meadowfoam is a flowering plant grown as an oilseed crop, especially in Oregon, USA. Bees visit the blossoms and somehow produce a honey flavour that people often describe as either vanilla, marshmallow, toasted sugar, caramel or butterscotch.

Most honeys start sweetly and reveal their distinctive taste in good time. Strawberry tree honey, also called corbezzolo honey, is less patient: it gets straight to the bitter notes.

Found in parts of the Mediterranean, especially Sardinia, it’s famous for being bitter. Not “has this gone off?” bitter, but deliberately complex: herbal, dark, coffee-like, sometimes with notes of leather, liquorice, smoke or bitter greens.

Heather honey, including Irish and Scottish heather honey, has a texture with party tricks. It can be thixotropic, which means it sits almost like a gel until stirred or disturbed, then loosens up.

Its flavour is just as distinctive: aromatic, herbal, earthy, sometimes smoky or bitter-edged.

Not all edible honey comes from the familiar honeybee. In tropical regions, stingless bees produce honey that can be thinner, tangier and more acidic than standard honey - honey with a little zing in its step.

It’s often described as sweet-sour, citrusy, fermented-tasting or medicinal. Because it has a higher moisture content than ordinary honey, it doesn’t always behave like the thick jarred honey people expect.

Comb honey is not strange because of where it comes from, but because of how you eat it. It’s honey still sealed inside the beeswax comb: nature’s own edible packaging, more or less.

Cut into it, spread it, or eat a small piece whole. The honey floods out as you chew, while the wax becomes gum-like. Some people swallow the wax; others chew it and discard it, like very posh chewing gum.

Finally, there is mad honey: the honey that sounds like it should come with a drumroll, a folk tale and a stern look from someone sensible. It is made when bees collect nectar from certain rhododendron flowers containing natural grayanotoxins.

People do eat it, especially in parts of Turkey, Nepal and the Black Sea region, but this is not a novelty to treat casually. In the wrong amount, mad honey can cause dizziness, nausea, vomiting, low blood pressure and other poisoning symptoms.