Greek Honey: Varietals, Regions & How to Buy It in the UK

Greek honey is distinct for two structural reasons: most of it comes from wild, uncultivated flora — thyme scrub, pine and fir forest, mountain flowers — rather than from farmed crops, and an unusually large share of it is honeydew honey rather than blossom honey. Buying it in the UK comes down to the label: a named varietal, a named region, a harvest year and Greece declared as the country of origin, not Greek branding over a blend declaration. This guide covers the main varietals, the two protected names, Cretan honey, and how to judge a jar sold in the UK.

Greek honey is honey harvested in Greece, characterised by wild-flora sources — thyme, pine, fir, heather, chestnut, orange blossom — and by an unusually high share of honeydew honey from the country’s pine and fir forests.

What makes Greek honey different?

The first difference is the landscape. Greece is dry and mountainous, and much of its beekeeping happens on uncultivated land: thyme and other aromatic scrub on the islands, pine forest in the north, fir forest on the mountains of the Peloponnese and central Greece. Where honey in much of northern Europe is gathered largely from agricultural crops such as oilseed rape and clover, Greek bees forage predominantly on wild plants. The difference is measurable: the pollen spectrum of a Greek varietal honey is dominated by wild species, and pollen analysis is how the thyme share of the protected Cretan honey is verified — its specification requires at least 10% thyme pollen among nectar-plant pollen grains.

The second difference is honeydew. A large share of Greek honey is not made from nectar at all. Pine honey is made from honeydew, the sugary secretion of Marchalina hellenica, a scale insect that lives on Greek pines; a 2006 report by the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO) cited estimates that around 60% of the honey produced in Greece is pine honey. Fir honey is made by the same honeydew route on the Greek fir. Honeydew honeys are typically darker, less sweet and lower in glucose than blossom honeys, which is why they stay liquid for so long — our crystallised honey guide explains the mechanism.

Neither point makes Greek honey better than anyone else’s — it makes it identifiable: distinctive wild flora, a large honeydew share, and two names with published specifications behind them.

What are the main Greek honey varietals?

Three notes. Thyme honey is the flagship, and has its own guide: thyme honey. The fir honey of Mount Mainalo carries vanilia in its registered name; no flavour is added. And the crystallisation column describes composition, not quality: honeydew honeys are low in glucose and stay liquid for months or years, while high-glucose blossom honeys such as orange blossom set quickly.

Fig. I · Greek varietals — colour and crystallisationDiagram

VarietalColour and characterCrystallisation

Fir (vanilia)PDO †

Pale with a pearly sheen

Crystallisation: Resists crystallising

Orange blossom

Light; pronounced citrus aroma

Crystallisation: Fast

ThymePDO ‡

Amber; intense herbal aroma

Crystallisation: Slow — months

Heather

Amber-red; strong character

Crystallisation: Fast

PinePDO ‡

Dark amber; resinous, only mildly sweet

Crystallisation: Very slow

Chestnut

Dark; a faint bitter edge

Crystallisation: Slow

Protected names on this page

†Fir — Meli Elatis Menalou Vanilia, the fir honey of Mount Mainalo (PDO).

‡Thyme and pine — Pefkothymaromelo Kritis, Crete pine-thyme honey: a natural combination of thyme and pine (PDO). It spans the thyme and pine rows above, and is not a varietal of its own.

Which Greek honeys have protected names?

Two — both protected designations of origin (PDO), and both checkable on public registers rather than taken on trust.

Meli Elatis Menalou Vanilia (Μέλι Ελάτης Μαινάλου Βανίλια) is the fir honeydew honey of Mount Mainalo in Arcadia, in the central Peloponnese — pale, with a pearly sheen unusual in honey. It was registered in the EU on 2 July 1996 and carried onto the UK register on 31 December 2020, when the UK scheme began.

Pefkothymaromelo Kritis (Πευκοθυμαρόμελο Κρήτης) is Crete’s pine-thyme honey: EU-registered on 15 September 2017, on the UK register since 31 December 2020, and at the time of writing the only Cretan honey we can find on the UK register. Its published specification is unusually concrete. The honey is a natural combination of thyme and pine honey produced across the island of Crete; pollen from Mediterranean thyme (Coridothymus capitatus) must make up at least 10% of the nectar-plant pollen grains; HMF must not exceed 25 mg/kg — tighter than the general legal limit of 40 — with moisture no more than 17%, extraction heating capped at 45 °C, and the honey remaining fluid for at least 12 months from harvest.

For a buyer, a protected name changes the question from “do I trust this brand?” to “does this jar carry the name?”. The specification is public, the name is legally reserved, and a jar can be checked against both.

What about Cretan honey?

Cretan honey has its own identity inside the Greek category. On the island’s dry, stony slopes the dominant nectar plant is wild thyme, which flowers from May to July; extraction happens once, as the bloom closes. Later in the season many Cretan beekeepers work the pine honeydew flow, and the long-standing practice of letting the two combine in the hive is what became the Pefkothymaromelo Kritis PDO described above. Cretan thyme honey on its own is covered in depth in our thyme honey guide.

Harvests swing with the weather, and honest sellers say so. In the drought year of 2024 the Athens newspaper To Vima reported steep production falls across Greece, quoting the president of the Federation of Greek Beekeepers’ Associations: “In Crete, which is the motherland of thyme honey, we didn’t harvest at all.” A year like that tightens supply, and origin-named Cretan honey from the following harvest reflects it.

How old is beekeeping in Greece?

Old enough to be documented rather than romanticised. Aristotle wrote about bees at length in the History of Animals, recording in Book V that “the bee, then, makes the wax from flowers”, while honey, he believed, was “deposited out of the atmosphere” and merely gathered. He was wrong about the atmosphere, but the passage shows managed hives under close observation in Greece nearly 2,400 years ago. Crete carries an emblem of the same craft on its protected honey to this day: the registered label of the Pefkothymaromelo Kritis PDO shows a representation of the island of Crete and of the Malia bee pendant. We cite these as history, nothing more.

How do you buy Greek honey in the UK?

Read the label back to front: the legally required statements first, the branding last.

• Country of origin. The Honey (England) Regulations 2015 (with parallel regulations elsewhere in the UK) require the country where the honey was harvested to appear on the label; a blend may instead carry wording such as “blend of honeys from more than one country”. A single-origin Greek honey says Greece. Greek lettering, bees and blue-and-white branding above a blend declaration is packaging, not origin.
• Varietal, region, harvest. An origin-named honey tells you what it is, where it came from and when: a label reading “thyme honey, Crete”, with the harvest year stated on it, is a set of checkable statements. The same regulations permit floral and regional origin wording only where the honey actually matches it, so specific labels carry legal weight that “Greek-style” and “Mediterranean honey” do not.
• Protected names. If a jar trades on Mainalo fir or on Cretan pine-thyme character, look for the PDO name itself. It is reserved for honey that meets the published specification, so its absence is informative.
• Price. Origin-named, single-varietal Greek honey is a small-yield product from wild flora. Expect it to cost a multiple of a supermarket blend, and take a “thyme honey” priced like one as a reason to reread the label — our guide to how to tell if honey is real covers the checks in detail.
• “Raw”. If the word raw appears, look for the numbers behind it — per-batch HMF and diastase results, not just the word. What the term can and cannot mean is set out in what is raw honey, and how origin-led honeys compare in raw honey vs manuka.

One thing you will not find in this guide is a claim about what Greek honey does for the body. No health claims for bee products are authorised in Great Britain, and we make none; our claims policy is set out on our evidence page.

Two safety notes

Honey — Greek or otherwise — is not suitable for infants under 12 months, because of the risk of infant botulism. This applies to every honey in this guide, protected-name and raw honeys included.

Bee products are allergens for some people. A known allergy to honey, pollen or other bee products applies to Greek honey exactly as it does to any other.

When will THYMELIA sell Cretan honey?

THYMELIA is a UK brand for raw Cretan bee products, sourced from western Crete, in the Chania region. We have no shop yet, and we are not naming a date for one. When they are, each batch will ship with a published certificate of analysis against our raw standard — HMF at most 40 mg/kg and diastase activity of at least 8 Schade units, per batch. How we source is at sourcing, and what we will test and publish is at testing.