Savannah Bee Company Guide: Five Single-Flower Honeys

October 12, 2026

Savannah Bee Company, a honey maker based in Savannah, Georgia, built its range on honeys named for a single flower. This guide explains what a single-flower honey is, how one gets made, and why five of the company's jars (tupelo, acacia, black sage, orange blossom and lavender) taste and set so differently. The story starts with tupelo: founder Ted Dennard learned beekeeping among the tupelo trees that grow along the Georgia and Florida line, and the company calls its tupelo honey the one that started it all.

Dennard founded the company in 2002. Before that he served in the Peace Corps in Jamaica from 1990 to 1992, teaching beekeeping in remote mountain villages and helping set up beekeeping programs in five schools, according to the company. In 2026 the company opened BeeTopia at its newest warehouse in Savannah, a space with an observation beehive (a glass-sided hive where visitors can watch the bees at work) and a garden of pollinator-friendly plants.

A few terms first. Nectar is the sugary liquid a flower makes to draw in insects. A varietal or monofloral honey is one named for a single plant, where most of the nectar came from that one flower; the opposite is a wildflower or polyfloral honey, gathered from whatever happened to bloom. Glucose and fructose are the two simple sugars that make up most of honey. Crystallization, also called granulation, is honey turning from clear and runny to cloudy and firm as sugar crystals form. The honey guide covers the wider subject, from color grades to labels.

What makes a honey single-flower

The international food standard for honey, set by the Codex Alimentarius, the joint food-standards body of the United Nations food and health agencies, describes honey as nectar that bees collect, transform with substances of their own, dehydrate, store and leave in the comb to ripen. The same standard says honey's flavor and aroma come from the plant. That is the whole premise of a varietal jar: change the flower, and the honey changes with it.

Codex allows a honey to carry a flower's name when it comes wholly or mainly from that flower and has the taste, smell, chemistry and microscopic properties that match it. The microscopic part means pollen. Every honey carries a few grains of pollen from the flowers the bees worked, and counting them under a microscope, a method called melissopalynology, shows which plants went into the jar. A reference paper from the International Honey Commission, a scientific network of honey researchers, recommends checking three things together: whether the honey tastes and smells as its type should, whether the pollen fits the declared flower, and whether the chemistry falls in that type's range. No single test settles it alone.

Pollen counts are not as simple as a majority vote. Some flowers shed far less pollen into honey than others. Swiss federal bee researchers at Agroscope found acacia honey very low in pollen, and they note that an acacia honey with more than 10 percent acacia pollen can be considered predominantly acacia. The taste and the chemistry carry the rest of the proof.

How a single-flower honey gets made

Bees cannot be told which flower to visit. A varietal honey is made by putting the hives where one plant dominates the landscape, at the moment it blooms, and taking the honey off when the bloom ends. Timing is everything, because the bees will move on to whatever flowers next.

Tupelo shows the method at its most exacting. The Slow Food Foundation, which catalogs traditional foods in its Ark of Taste, describes tupelo beekeepers moving their bees into the trees for a bloom that lasts only about 2 to 3 weeks in April and May, often keeping hives on remote docks reached only by boat. Before the tupelo flows, the bees must be cleared of any honey already in the hive; gallberry honey, gathered just before tupelo, is the most common one to remove. Savannah Bee Company says its tupelo is sourced only from white tupelo flowers and harvested for just a few weeks each spring.

Lavender follows the same rule in a different landscape. Savannah Bee Company describes beekeepers along the border of Spain and Portugal lining the lavender fields with their bee boxes during the bloom in May. Black sage depends on the weather even more. The company's note on seasonal supply names black sage among the rare varietals most affected by weather and bloom conditions, and its product page says the honey is harvested only four seasons per decade.

Why some jars set and others stay clear

Honey holds more sugar than its water can normally keep dissolved, a state chemists call supersaturated. CORDIS, the European Commission's research news service, explains in a 2023 article that glucose tends to come out of that solution as crystals, so more glucose means faster crystallization, while fructose slows it. Pollen grains, air bubbles and water can act as seeds the crystals grow on. Temperature matters too: for most honeys, warmth slows crystallization and cool storage speeds it up, until about 10 to 14 °C (50 to 57 °F), below which it slows again. The same article names acacia as a honey that almost never crystallizes and calls crystallization a natural process, not a sign of lower quality.

The useful number is the fructose to glucose ratio: the grams of fructose divided by the grams of glucose. The higher it is, the more slowly a honey tends to set. The International Honey Commission's reference sheets for European varietal honeys give average figures for three of the five flowers in this guide.

Honey type (reference sheet)	Fructose, g per 100 g	Glucose, g per 100 g	Fructose to glucose ratio	Crystallization rate
Acacia (robinia)	42.7	26.5	1.61	Slow
Citrus, including orange blossom	38.7	31.4	1.24	Moderate
Lavender	36.0	30.6	1.18	Moderate

Run the glucose figures against each other and the difference is plain. Per 100 grams, acacia holds about 5 grams less glucose than citrus honey, roughly 16 percent less, and about 4 grams less than lavender honey, roughly 13 percent less. That gap helps explain why acacia honey tends to stay clear and runny, while citrus and lavender honeys set at a moderate pace on the same reference sheets. Agroscope's Swiss acacia samples averaged a ratio of 1.65, usually stayed liquid for more than a year, and had to exceed 1.4 to qualify as acacia at all.

Tupelo and black sage sit on the slow side too. The Slow Food entry attributes tupelo's resistance to granulation to its unusually high fructose content, and Savannah Bee Company describes its black sage as slow to crystallize, staying smooth and liquid for a long time. Even so, the company's tupelo page states plainly that crystallization is a natural process for raw honey and a sign of purity, not spoilage. Its fix is to gently warm the jar in a bowl of warm water. The guide to whether honey expires explains the rest of honey's shelf life.

Tupelo: the honey that started it

Tupelo honey comes from a swamp tree. The USDA Forest Service's Silvics of North America, the federal reference on American trees, places the Ogeechee tupelo from coastal South Carolina through Georgia's Ogeechee Valley into northern Florida, along the Ogeechee, Altamaha and Suwannee Rivers. It flowers from late March to early May, its male flowers produce a lot of nectar, and thousands of hectares (a hectare is about 2.5 acres) have been planted for bee farms along the lower Apalachicola River. In its Florida range it makes up less than 1 percent of the woody plants.

Savannah Bee Company says tupelo honey is produced in only two small regions of the United States, the Okefenokee Swamp and the Apalachicola River Basin, and gives its harvest window as 2 to 3 weeks a year. It describes the honey as buttery, with a golden green hue and a soft, vanishing sweetness. The Slow Food entry likewise describes pure tupelo as light amber, with what some see as a green cast. It belongs on hot biscuits and buttered toast, where its butteriness has something to agree with (shop Savannah Bee Company tupelo honey).

Acacia: the clear one

Acacia honey is named for a tree that is not a true acacia. Agroscope identifies its source as Robinia pseudoacacia, the black locust or false acacia, a North American tree introduced to Europe in 1602, and notes that robinia honey is the correct name even though acacia is the one used in trade. The researchers describe it as very light in color, with a mild aroma, strong sweetness, weak acidity and no bitterness, fresh, floral and fruity.

Savannah Bee Company describes its raw acacia honey as pale and luminous, with vanilla notes, and lists Hungary and Romania as its origin, from black locust forests that grow from northern Italy to Ukraine. The company credits its high fructose content with keeping it liquid, and notes that some call it "white water." The company's account of Dennard's travels describes the acacia forests of Hungary in white bloom. A honey this quiet is the one for green tea, yogurt and fresh cheese, where a louder honey would take over (shop Savannah Bee Company acacia honey).

Black sage: the weather honey

Black sage, Salvia mellifera, is a shrub of California's coastal sage scrub. A plant guide from the University of California, Irvine calls it very common there and notes that honey bees harvest its nectar. Savannah Bee Company describes the plant as native to California and the Baja region of Mexico, blooming from April to June with small, tube-shaped flowers from light lavender to deep violet on a shrub that sometimes grows 6 to 10 feet tall.

The bloom is the catch. The company says black sage generally needs little rain, but it needs a wet winter and a wet early spring to bloom and make nectar, and conditions must be right in California's lower Sierra Nevada for a harvest. It lists the origin as the United States and Mexico. The company describes the honey as light in color, earthy, with notes of fruit and black pepper, and the flavor changes from year to year. That savory edge makes it the jar for cocktails, cheese and fruit boards, and cooking (shop Savannah Bee Company black sage honey).

Orange blossom: the bright one

Savannah Bee Company describes its orange blossom honey as a monofloral honey from orange groves in northeastern Mexico, Florida and Spain, with a bright citrus aroma and a gentle floral sweetness that finishes on a subtle citrus note. The product description adds that the bees are also vital to pollinating the groves, which produce their oranges later in the season. The International Honey Commission sheet for citrus honey describes a very light honey with a floral, fresh-fruit smell, medium sweetness and weak acidity.

With a ratio of 1.24 on the reference sheet, citrus honey sets at a moderate pace, and the company notes that its orange blossom may crystallize over time. Its brightness suits baking, black tea and a spoonful over ricotta (shop Savannah Bee Company orange blossom honey).

Lavender: the meadow one

Savannah Bee Company's lavender honey comes from the wild lavender fields along the border of Spain and Portugal, where beekeepers set out their boxes for the May bloom. The company calls the flavor mildly sweet with floral notes, and writes that many beekeepers believe lavender is the bees' favorite flower for the amount of nectar it produces. Its note on lavender honey makes a point worth knowing: the honey does not taste like lavender oil from the petals. Dennard calls it sweet and rich, and slow to granulate.

The International Honey Commission sheet for European lavender honey, based mainly on lavandin (a cultivated hybrid lavender grown for its oil), describes a light honey with a bright yellow tone, a woody, floral and fruity smell, and sometimes a blackcurrant aftertaste, setting at a moderate rate. It is a natural partner for goat cheese, stone fruit and herbal tea (shop Savannah Bee Company lavender honey).

Five jars, side by side

Jar	Flower	Origin the company gives	Bloom	The company's flavor words	How it sets
Tupelo	White (Ogeechee) tupelo, Nyssa ogeche	Georgia and Florida	Late March to early May; 2 to 3 week harvest	Buttery, soft vanishing sweetness	Slow
Acacia	Black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia	Hungary and Romania	June, in Switzerland	Vanilla notes, pale and delicate	Slow; usually stays liquid over a year
Black sage	Salvia mellifera	United States and Mexico	April to June, after a wet winter	Earthy, fruit and black pepper	Slow
Orange blossom	Orange trees	United States, Mexico and Spain	When the orange groves flower	Bright, sweet, citrus finish	Moderate
Lavender	Lavender	Spain and Portugal	May	Mildly sweet, floral	Moderate; slow, per the company

Beyond the single flower

The company also makes honeys named for places rather than plants. Its Charleston honey comes from the wildflowers of the Lowcountry, the low coastal country around Charleston, and is described as bold and smoky-sweet (shop Savannah Bee Company Charleston honey). Its Savannah honey draws on the magnolias, spiderwort and other flowers of the company's home city, with floral notes and a clean finish (shop Savannah Bee Company Savannah honey). A wildflower jar records a place across a season; a varietal jar records one plant in a few weeks.

Using the five

Taste them from pale to dark: acacia first, then orange blossom and lavender, then black sage and tupelo, each from a clean spoon at room temperature. On a cheese board, acacia and lavender suit fresh and soft cheeses, while black sage and tupelo can stand beside aged ones; the guide to honey, mostarda and membrillo with cheese goes further. For a hot cup, orange blossom is the natural sweetener for the red rooibos with honey and orange peel recipe. Keep every jar sealed, dry and at room temperature, and a jar that sets can be brought back in a bowl of warm water.

A single-flower honey is a record of one plant, one place and a few weeks of weather. The clarity of the acacia, the green cast of the tupelo and the years when black sage never comes are the flower's own chemistry and the season's luck, read straight from the jar.

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Visitors can ask staff questions in the shop. The full range is in the Savannah Bee Company collection.