Manuka vs pine honey: A comparison
EBRU ERKE
One of our undervalued products is pine honey, despite being nearly identical to New Zealand’s manuka honey, which is widely promoted as a marketing phenomenon and sold for hundreds of dollars per kilogram.
Pine honey might seem ordinary to us, right? Many even find its resinous flavor “too heavy.” But in reality, it’s one of the rarest honeys in the world. This isn’t an exaggeration. At the 8th International Muğla Beekeeping and Pine Honey Congress I attended last week, I discovered fascinating facts about this remarkable honey — facts that even I, someone who thought I knew it well, was unaware of. For instance, its phenolic content rivals, and may even surpass, that of the renowned manuka honey, which sells for hundreds of dollars per kilo.
Let me begin by explaining why pine honey is unique compared to other types of honey. Unlike ordinary honey, which is made from flower nectar, pine honey is a secretion honey. This means that bees don’t collect nectar from flowers, but instead gather a secretion from the trunk of pine trees. During the summer, a creature called "Marchalina hellenica" produces a clear, colorless secretion on the bark of red pine trees, which it extracts from the tree’s wood. This substance, known as honeydew, often drips down in string-like strands from the tree. The bees collect this honeydew from the pine trunks and carry it back to their hives. There, it is transformed into pine honey through enzymes in the bees’ bodies, and stored in the honeycombs. To help the honey mature, the bees flap their wings to evaporate the water, leaving behind the final pine honey.
The Marchalina hellenica, which secretes honeydew, can only thrive in a few specific regions, making pine honey a rare product found only in these areas. In Türkiye, it is primarily found in Muğla, Marmaris, Aydın, and, to a lesser extent, certain parts of Mount Ida, so pine honey can only be produced in these locations. Globally, pine honey is extremely rare, with 95 percent of its production taking place in Türkiye, mainly in the red pine forests of the Aegean region by the Anatolian Honey Bee. The remaining 5 percent is produced in Greece, making pine honey a product almost exclusive to Türkiye.
Although we have somehow trivialized it, pine honey is actually the most sought-after Turkish honey abroad, making it a crucial export product. However, despite its high quality, Türkiye faces a significant challenge in exporting it. According to Dr. Emel Damarlı, the R&D and quality director at Balparmak, Turkish honey was often rejected at customs because European countries were using the wrong analysis method. European laboratories were applying the flower honey analysis method to pine honey, which led to inaccurate results. After four years of dedicated work by Dr. Emel and her team, a specialized analysis method for pine honey was developed. It’s worth noting that the laboratory they work in is highly advanced, capable of analyzing 833 different parameters for honey and other bee products. Thanks to their innovative techniques, they have refined these parameters over the years and become one of the world’s largest specialized laboratories for bee products, despite efforts by counterfeit producers.
Let’s return to pine honey. In such cases, it’s not enough to conduct research and develop the correct analysis method; you also need to get the relevant authorities to accept it. Dr. Emel and her team managed to gain acceptance for their method in Europe by publishing scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals. These efforts helped open the door for Türkiye’s pine honey exports.
While the export process has been made easier, there are still significant challenges facing this rare honey. The production areas for pine honey are shrinking due to forest fires in the region and the effects of global climate change. There are four key factors that influence the creation of pine honey: strong bees, the presence of Marchalina hellenica, morning dew at harvest time, and the absence of North winds during that period. In other words, nature plays a big role, and the conditions must align perfectly for pine honey to be produced.
There are also significant efforts being made on the ground to boost the brand value of our pine honey. Barış Saylak, the provincial director of agriculture and forestry in Muğla, who hails from Milas, places great importance on protecting and increasing the production of pine honey. Alongside creating new pine areas, his team has addressed several critical issues, such as regulating bee accommodation practices, optimizing the distribution of bee colonies across the land to ensure efficient resource use, increasing productivity per colony, and resolving accommodation-related problems. For these efforts, they were even awarded the “Projects Adding Value to Agriculture” award by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.
As I mentioned earlier, scientific studies and publications on honey play a crucial role. According to Mr. Barış, while there are 296 scientific articles on manuka honey, only 30 have been published about pine honey. In fact, with the scientific articles published worldwide and the establishment of an institutional structure that determines the quality criteria (they have started to write this value, which they call UMF - Unique Manuka Factor, on the packaging), manuka honey has come to the fore and become one of the most sought-after honey in the world. But there is no need to worry. Thanks to laboratories with advanced analysis capabilities and visionary leaders, I am confident that pine honey will only continue to rise in value. So, let’s take it upon ourselves to become voluntary ambassadors for pine honey. By consuming it more and even gifting it to our foreign guests, we can help spread its unique qualities far and wide. How does that sound?
