A beekeeper can fill clover honey and orange blossom honey from identical hive boxes. The difference is where the beekeeper parked them in spring. Orange blossom honey is honey that bees make mainly from citrus nectar during the few weeks the groves bloom. It's pale and mild, with a floral, faintly citrus note, and nothing orange is added.
A beekeeper who wants the name on the label has to move colonies into citrus country at the right moment, keep them there while the trees flower, and pull the honey before the bees move on to whatever blooms next.
Where the hives go
In Highlands County, Florida, the orange bloom starts in mid to late February. A UF/IFAS Extension article from Highlands County describes beekeepers from Florida and many other states scouting spots in January, as close to the groves as they can get. The same piece makes a point that surprises people outside farming: citrus doesn't depend on insects the way California almonds do, so the beekeepers get most of the benefit. Many grove owners accept honey as payment for letting the hives sit nearby.
Grove owners can be paid in honey because citrus is generous with nectar. Malcolm Sanford, writing as the University of Florida's extension beekeeping specialist, called most citrus "superior in nectar production" and said it is responsible in good years for "a premium, high quality honey crop" (UF/IFAS, hosted by Texas A&M).
The window is short. A Greek-led research team studied orange blossom honey from test orchards in Greece, Sicily and Egypt (Kasiotis et al., Molecules, 2023). At the Greek sites, in Argolida, hives went into the orange orchards on 23 April 2020, when most trees were only 5–10% in flower, and the honey was harvested on 14 May, three weeks later. California has its own version of this migration: the state's Food and Agricultural Code records that honeybee colonies have historically been placed in the citrus belt of Kern, Tulare, Fresno and Madera counties, partly to produce honey.
What does orange blossom honey taste like?
UF's Gardening Solutions program describes orange blossom honey as "light-colored and mild, with a fresh scent and a light citrus taste" (UF/IFAS). A 2024 study of Spanish honeys put it next to rosemary honey as "slightly yellowish", against the darker brown of eucalyptus (Rivera-Pérez et al., Foods).
The citrus note can be traced to specific compounds. Food chemists single out methyl anthranilate and a group of lilac aldehydes as markers of citrus honey, and the Kasiotis team cites methyl anthranilate at concentrations above 0.5 ppm as characteristic. Those compounds start in the flower. When Croatian researchers sampled Satsuma mandarin nectar straight from the blossom, its main scent compounds included linalool and indole, alongside methyl anthranilate (Jerković et al., Molecules, 2016). They also found the honey's profile shifted once it had been through the bees and the hive, so the jar isn't a straight copy of the flower.
Scent is the other way the bloom leaves the grove. Our Orange Blossom perfume, from our Orange Blossom collection, is a soliflore: rather than the usual top, heart and base notes, it holds only that flower (it's a fragrance, not a food flavoring). Honey records what the nectar tasted like after the bees worked it, while a perfume tries to hold what the tree smelled like in flower. Our post on the scent of orange blossom in the grove covers why distilled neroli smells greener than the living blossom.
How does a label earn "orange blossom"?
In the US, the rule is a standard of truth rather than a percentage. FDA's 2018 guidance on honey labeling says a producer doesn't have to name the floral source at all, but may name a plant or blossom if they have information showing it is the "chief floral source" of the honey. "Orange Blossom Honey" is one of the agency's own examples. Honey mixed with sugar or syrup can't be sold as plain honey.
Proving the chief source is harder for citrus than for most honeys. Pollen counts under a microscope are the usual test, but citrus pollen is what scientists call under-represented: a genuine citrus honey carries relatively few citrus pollen grains, and the rest comes from whatever else grows nearby. In the Kasiotis team's Sicilian samples (19 honeys analyzed), citrus averaged just 6% of the pollen from nectar plants, while the pea family (clovers and their relatives) averaged 49%. The same paper notes that national rules in several European countries set the citrus pollen threshold for a monofloral citrus honey anywhere from 3% to 20%.
That's why labs now lean on chemistry. A 2023 study from the Universitat Politècnica de València found that measuring lilac aldehydes together with methyl anthranilate gave a more reliable way to classify citrus honey than pollen alone (Escriche et al., Food Research International).
Our view as citrus growers: the most trustworthy jars name a region and a season, not just a flower.
Why some California groves keep bees out
California has a twist that Florida doesn't. Seedless mandarins such as Clementines and W. Murcotts can set seeds when bees carry pollen in from other citrus, and seeded fruit is worth less. The Legislature's findings for the Seedless Mandarin and Honeybee Coexistence Working Group Act cite a 2005 UC Riverside study putting seedless mandarins at three to four times the revenue of seeded ones.
The rules that followed, adopted by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, create a Protection Area within two miles of registered seedless mandarin acreage in four San Joaquin Valley counties (Madera, Fresno, Tulare, Kern), from March 1 through May 31 (CDFA regulation text). A registered grower can ask a registered beekeeper to move an apiary out of that radius, and beekeepers have to be reachable by phone from 4 to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday, during the season. So in the same counties where colonies have long been brought in for citrus honey, some mandarin growers now have a formal way to ask them to leave during bloom.
Photo by Sotirios T. Kokkinos on Unsplash.
