You can often find for example “Chestnut honey”, or “Sage honey”, or “Meadowflower honey”. How do they know? OK, I get that if there’s no chestnut within 50km you won’t get it, but how do they know which type of plant the bees made honey from?
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Bees will rarely travel far from their hive. They can travel up to about 1km but if there’s plenty of food close by their preference is always going to be to stay as close to the hive as poissble
So Beekeepers will place their hives in areas that have a high concentration of whatever flavour they are aiming for knowing that the bees will primarily source nectar from these plants
Not every plant will be the flavour they are seeking but if it’s a high enough percentage than the honey will predominately have that flavour.
As others have mentioned, generally beekeepers know what plants are nearby. If you know you have a lot of clover nearby, and your honey tastes like clover honey — well, you’ll probably label it clover honey.
Along those lines — plenty of folks just taste the honey and take their best guess. Not perfectly accurate, but it’s usually accurate-ish.
If you want to get nerdy about it and have the right equipment, you can actually look at individual pollen grains in the honey and figure out what plant they belong to. Or, you can even use DNA in some cases!
But generally it’s a matter of deductive reasoning. If your honey looks like a duck and quacks like a duck… or in this case, looks like clover honey and tastes like clover honey…. 🙂
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