Clover honey
The everyday honey that NZ baking is built on.
- Flower season
- Nov – Mar
- Colour
- Light gold, almost white when crystallised
- Flavour
- Mild, sweet, vanilla-floral, no bitterness
- Texture
- Smooth, crystallises softly to creamed honey
Clover honey is the workhorse of the NZ honey industry. It's produced from white clover (Trifolium repens), the same legume that fixes nitrogen in dairy pasture, and to a lesser extent from red clover. Both flower densely across the spring–summer pasture cycle, and a strong clover season can produce 60–100kg per hive.
The flavour is the lightest of the major NZ honeys — mild, faintly floral, with no bitter finish. It's the honey most NZ recipes were originally written around: Anzac biscuits, honey-and-soy marinades, hot-cross bun glaze.
Clover sets to a soft, white-gold creamed honey within a few months of extraction. Most supermarket creamed honey in NZ is clover-based, often blended with a small fraction of bush or rewarewa for character.
The big clover-producing regions are Canterbury (where the Plains' irrigated dairy clover is the country's biggest single source), Marlborough, the Manawatū, and the Waikato. Smaller-scale apiaries also harvest clover honey from sheep-and-beef pasture in inland Otago.
Pairings
- Toast and butter
- Porridge
- Earl Grey
- Yoghurt and granola
Where in NZ Clover comes from
The regions where clover is meaningfully harvested. Each region has its own quirks of climate, bush, and harvest window.
- Canterbury
- Marlborough
- Central Otago
Apiaries that produce Clover
3 listed apiaries harvest clover as part of their range.