The quest to find the world’s best honey

{"text":[[{"start":5.04,"text":"Speckled with colourful wildflowers, the meadow looked like a pointillist painting. Each footstep released another heady aroma: thyme, oregano, clover; the earthy tones of yarrow; the high notes of mint. The mountain air buzzed with bees."}],[{"start":22.54,"text":"“It’s their office,” said Mustafa Altun, as he watched a grey worker bee toil on a summer bloom, its hind legs bulging with pollen sacks up to its knees. Altun poked open a small door at the base of a beehive. “That will make their commute home easier,” he joked."}],[{"start":39.52,"text":"Turkey is a honey superpower. After China, it is the second-biggest honey producer in the world. Artvin province is one of the regions that explains Turkey’s prowess: a remote knot of wildly biodiverse mountains in north-eastern Turkey where the Caucasus meets the Black Sea. Arguably, it produces the best honey in the world. The quest is to find it."}],[{"start":60.685,"text":"Turkey certainly produces the world’s most expensive honey. The Guinness Book of World Records awarded that accolade to Centauri honey in 2021 after one lot — extracted from caves 2,500 metres above sea level — sold for €10,000 a kilogramme. So-called Elvish honey, produced in a secret Artvin valley nearby, retailed in Harrods last year at £1,250 for a 200g gift set."}],[{"start":87.43,"text":"Then there is Artvin’s famously intoxicating “mad honey”, which bees make from rhododendron nectar. In 401 BCE, the Greek general Xenophon documented how his soldiers “lost their senses, vomited . . . and were unable to stand upright” after they gorged on deli bal. Three centuries later, King Mithridates laid out honeycombs to ambush invading Roman troops, slaughtering them after they ate the honey and fell into a hallucinogenic stupor."}],[{"start":115.666,"text":"“Our honey is not intoxicating, but it is definitely among the best,” said Zeynep Ekşioğlu, an Istanbul-based chef and author. With Altun, she aims to produce and market a hive-to-table brand called “Profunda”."}],[{"start":129.089,"text":"“Its biomedical markers are off the chart,” Ekşioğlu said, brandishing a sheaf of laboratory tests which showed its antioxidant properties are comparable to New Zealand’s famous mānuka honey."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":141.04,"text":"Bees and honey hold a revered position in Ottoman history and Turkish folklore. The Koran reveals honey as one of God’s signs, “a drink of varying colours, which is healing for people”. During the long centuries of Ottoman rule, beeswax candles were reserved for Sultans while lesser mortals had to put up with smokier tallow."}],[{"start":160.804,"text":"Today, many urban Turks return from summer holidays with jars of honey and fresh tomatoes from their families’ villages in the country. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has credited a spoonful of chestnut honey, best produced in his family home province of Rize, as a bedtime cure-all."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":179.04,"text":"Such homely comforts accord with Turks’ image of their country as a pastoral idyll. Only last month, after hosting the Nato leaders’ summit, Erdoğan extolled how his government’s security campaigns meant that “our shepherds can now comfortably graze their flocks in the highlands” and children can “swim in rivers and streams”."}],[{"start":197.48,"text":"That vision of an earthly Eden seemed to fit the simple life of Osman Yılmaz, a nomadic beekeeper, whose livelihood hinges on Artvin’s floral abundance and the Caucasian honeybee. Its proboscis, a straw-like mouthpart more than 7mm long, allows it to reach nectar buried deep inside flowers that is beyond the reach of other bees."}],[{"start":217.92,"text":"“I start in valley orchards at the beginning of summer, and then take the hives higher up, following the flowers,” Yılmaz said, standing in a field dotted with beehives, his rickety hut in one corner, pine-clad mountains rising all around. The clang-clonk-clang of cowbells sounded in the distance."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":235.162,"text":"Yet this rural idyll, celebrated in politicians’ speeches and carried home in jam jars, is being hollowed out. Decades of migration have swollen Turkey’s cities and emptied much of the countryside of young people. Over the past 20 years, a construction boom fuelled by cheap credit has pushed roads, dams and mines into remote valleys."}],[{"start":256.733,"text":"Ominously, almost half of Artvin’s agricultural land is given over to mining licences, according to a 2021 study by TEMA, an environmental foundation."}],[{"start":267.64,"text":"“There are lots of problems here, but no obvious solutions,” said Osman Kaya, headman of Savaş, a rural hamlet reached by a grinding 17km drive from the nearest town."}],[{"start":278.48,"text":"At its sole teahouse, a chorus of elderly men lamented Savaş’s fate. There were no good roads, no internet, no jobs. The promised chlorine for drinking water never arrived and both schools had closed. There were almost no women — wives preferred the city — and no children either. “There’s no reproduction!” exclaimed one."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":299.39,"text":"Ekşioğlu and Altun want to change all that. Altun grew up in Artvin, spent three decades working in Istanbul at its chamber of commerce, and returned to his village when “I heard it calling: save me”."}],[{"start":313.48,"text":"Their plan is simple, in theory. Produce exceptional honey, certify its biochemical properties, package it elegantly and then sell it for enough to give young people a reason to stay."}],[{"start":321.71,"text":"“If they could earn sufficient money here from beekeeping, they could live in paradise,” Altun said. “Instead, they earn minimum wage in Istanbul and live in hell.”"}],[{"start":330.704,"text":"It’s a honeypot of a dream. Migratory producers such as Yılmaz get about $45 per kilogramme of wild flower honey. With roughly 50 hives, each yielding 10kg, his annual sales would be about $22,500, almost triple Turkey’s yearly minimum wage."}],[{"start":347.948,"text":"But premium honeys, such as Centauri or Elvish, sell for multiples more. Anzer honey, produced on a high plateau west of Artvin, can retail for over $200 per kilo."}],[{"start":359.04,"text":"Anzer is also a favourite of the brown bears that roam Turkey’s eastern mountains. When one beekeeper, curious about the bears’ tastes, laid it out with three lesser varieties, they unfailingly went for the most expensive one first. As Winnie the Pooh said: “[T]he only reason for being a bee is to make honey. And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”"}],[{"start":379.12,"text":"Identifying the world’s “best honey” is, of course, entirely subjective. What is the best of anything — whether it is wine, cigars, cars, clothes or honey? Further complicating matters, this year’s Artvin honey harvest was delayed, Altun said, due to a harsh winter that had left licks of snow on the highest meadows even in July."}],[{"start":400.96,"text":"When the harvest finally comes, female worker bees will evict redundant male drones. The colony will lay down its winter stores, sealing the ripened honey beneath wax, and the beekeeper will take his share. If an ageing queen bee is failing, her worker subjects may also smother her to death in a thick ball of their bodies in a display of insect regicide."}],[{"start":421.28,"text":"Still, there was last year’s harvest to sample. Erdoğan’s preferred chestnut honey was tannic, almost astringent, while dark brown Anzer — the bears’ favourite — was intensely floral. Tawny Profunda was aromatic, delicate and sweet — a sunburst of subjective wellbeing. As for deli bal, or mad honey? Its taste was hard to recall."}],[{"start":443.24,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786889701_1645.mp3"}