A Glance into Philippine Wild Forest Honey 🍯
On bees, wild honey hunters, and what a dialogue of care can build
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A Glance into Philippine Wild Forest Honey 🍯
Words by Jessica Hernandez, illustrations by Cassandra Balbas
There are currently eight surviving honeybee species in the world. Five of the eight species can be found in the Philippines.
It wasn’t until my year-long sabbatical there that I really thought to delve into the details of honey, mainly because I noticed a prevalent question raised not just by my tita, but also across city markets and highland road stands: real ba ito (is this real)? I was stunned to learn that over 75% of local honey brands in the Philippines are adulterated. That’s not to say that problems in the honey industry are isolated in the archipelago. In Honey, cookbook author and beekeeper Amy Newsome surfaces the result of greedy homogenization in the UK:
“National chains prefer producers who can provide enough stock to supply the country, rather than negotiating multiple supplier contracts to sell local honey in each region’s branches. And so big brand honey is usually sourced from beekeepers in multiple countries, filtered, heat-treated and blended until it all tastes the same, to produce enough squeeze bottles to ensure every shop never runs out. Everything unique about honey has been removed and 90% of the flavor gone.”
Before delving into Philippine honey origins, I think it’s best to first give a quick primer on bees.
Five honeybee species found in the Philippines
Apis andreniformis (native, wild)
Apis breviligula (native, wild)
Apis dorsata (native, wild)
Apis cerana (native, wild, managed)
Apis mellifera (introduced, managed)
12 stingless bee species, also honey producers
Tetragonula biroi (native, wild, managed) is the most commonly used species for pollination
The preferred domesticated bee species is the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) due to its productivity and more docile behavior, which was introduced during American occupation
To be clear, I’m not here today to discuss the proliferation of adulterated honey or authenticity tests; there’s enough opinions and arguments about that saturating search engines. (But if you’re craving to know, the only guaranteed way to validate honey authenticity is through an isotopic analysis which can be done by the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute in Manila, and yes, you guessed it! That requires $$$.)
The current truth is that finding true sources of honey (or food for that matter) requires diligence and effort and let’s be real, most food choices are made out of necessity and convenience. While I try to be mindful of my choices, I’m absolutely still complicit with large-scale food production. If you know where your apples grow and can name the chicken that laid your egg— fantastic. But shouldn’t accessible, convenient, and ethically raised food be the norm?
I digress— so let’s circle back. What does it mean when the primary discussion around Philippine honey hovers around its authenticity?
Never mind that honey is an incredible distillation of an area’s biodiversity and that we have bees to thank for pollinating our primary food crops and boosting plant productivity. What is at stake are the detrimental impacts of adulterated honey: the ways in which it undermines traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous people, misleads the market, and further diminishes the gamut of Philippine native bees and forest honey origins already invisible to most Filipinos.
Sourcing honey shouldn’t require filtering through layers of questions yet when we do, we exert our gratitude for the bees’ efforts: for pollinating plants allowing our food sources to thrive and for sharing the golden gifts from their lifetime of labor.
I’ll say it— the West tends to have an obsession with creating structures of value based on human gains (you know, things like growth and profitability often through *ahem* extractive systems). If we think about it, honey is as much a necessity to us as we have a necessity to it. Can’t we just care about something because it exists—because it’s part of the same complex world we inhabit—not because of its perceived worth to us?
In the Philippines, honey sourced from Palawan holds the greatest reputation. Palawan isn’t surprising, having the most tree coverage in the nation at 1.16Mha compared to a regional average of 227kha (according to Global Forest Watch). Within the archipelago’s so-called last frontier are sweet pockets of bounty kept intact by the island’s indigenous people.
The Tagbanua in Buong Narra, Palawan are expert honey gatherers who practice rituals as a way of respect to the forest gods.
“Before honey gathering, usually the wife or companion, notify the spirit of the tree by rinsing the trunk of the trees with water.”
The Batak of northern Palawan have extensive knowledge about bees and their behavior, paying special attention to the trees that flower over the course of the seasons. It is said that the Batak did not know about bees until Ugnaw, a forest caretaker spirit, showed himself to a wandering Batak and granted permission to collect honey.
Tubers and wild honey once provided a substantial source of nourishment to the Batak diet, making honey a precious forest gift. It is said that if a gatherer accidentally drops an entire hive on the ground, “Ugnaw will send the bees away and the local people will find themselves without any honey at all.”
Batak and Tagbanua knowledge surrounding honey is immense. They can identify flowering forest trees in the order they bloom and have a discerning palate for honey quality. Sarah Webb, a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Queensland, during a field study in Palawan wrote that the Tagbanua, not surprisingly, are able “to determine which flower nectar had been sourced by smelling honey.”
The Batak, too, have a keen sense for honey. They report the most desirable honey to be produced by wild potiokan and nigoan honeybee species foraged from the following trees: taloto, dumaresa, bayoso, lahipga.
Because they know honey, they also know the land, the trees and plants. They understand the gifts of the archipelago’s forests.
What if we celebrate our local flora and honeys in the same way we speak of honey varietals like Acacia, Buckwheat, Orange Blossom from Granada, Sea Lavender from UK’s East Anglia region, Manuka from New Zealand? Would you believe me when I say that Manuka—the current superfood darling of the honey world—was once a plant considered by the New Zealand government as an invasive weed in the 1950s? Imagine that.
While Manuka honey is prized for its antibacterial, antiviral, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, emerging research suggests honey produced by Tetrgonula biroi possess antibacterial activity against multi-drug resistant pathogens such as Staphylococcal aureus. In other words, what else can funneling resources into the archipelago’s diverse bee species (rather than the more widely used Apis mellifera) reveal about the potential of Philippine native bees?
I do, also, want to point out that monofloral honey is not necessarily superior to wild multifloral honey. According to Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Sacred and Herbal Heeling Beers,
“Ancient honeys were from a profusion of wildflowers, whatever grew locally. It was exceedingly uncommon for honey to be gathered from a single species of plant, such as the alfalfa or clove honeys of today, unless that plant species existed in great abundance.”
Philippine honey does not command the same attention from the world, but does it make it any less significant?
I think about Kabo of Hagdanan Farm in Bataan and his advocacy for local wild honey hunters in the area. He talks about the seasons of Narra (the national tree of the Philippines), Tanguile, and mango trees. The Tanguile tree, in particular, flowers once every 5-10 years, gifting a unique source of nectar for local honeybees. According to Kabo, bees that forage nectar from Tanguile flowers produce a rich, velvety, and creamy honey with notes of coffee.
Learning about honey reminds us to be observant of the archipelago’s nuanced rhythms and opens the door to the generosity of our forests. Can honey remind us to celebrate the season of the Narra or the season of the Tanguile?
“For example, the Narra, it produces a very yellowish honey when the bees gather [the nectar]. Sometimes the season of the Narra tree and the mango tree coincides with each other. That's my favorite for the moment. I've tasted the Narra with the mango and you have this floral [with] a little bit of this citrusy flavor. That's my favorite so far… It’s different every time.”
Outside of Luzon, Bea Crisostomo of Ritual offers a wild honey from the forests of Baslay, Dauin in Negros Oriental from an area canvased with coffee trees. Hapag sources a dark honey gathered by mamuhagays (wild honey hunters) in Davao, Mindanao. Toyo Eatery highlights wild forest honey (harvested by the Agutaynen tribe from the mountains of San Vicente, Palawan) in their housemade iced tea and Kyuts cocktail.
Will establishing trust in honey consumerism even lead to significant change? I don’t know, but I think it’s still worth trying. Speaking of honey beyond fraud can, at the very least, create a much more robust dialogue about the vibrant world of honey and native bees in the archipelago.
Honey may seem like a trivial thing, conjuring up images of bear-shaped plastic silhouettes at the supermarket or the more ubiquitous unlabeled cuatro canto bottles in the Philippines— but it seeps the language of the archipelago’s forests and flora and all the ways we are connected.
Perhaps, just perhaps, it may lead to more wonder, more attention, and more care.
ICYMI 👀
When we choose to say Bongkitan rice or Balatinaw rice, we challenge the economic system that favors productivity and efficiency at the cost of the earth. When we choose to say balikutsa or pakaskas or muscovado, we participate in the sustenance of traditional food ways. When we choose to say Bulkan or Latundan banana, we savor the land’s generosity.
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