Quick: Name something made by insects that can be found in almost every pantry in America. Don't reach for the Raid, I'm talking of course about honey.

Honey is one of the oldest human foods, having been collected as long as 10,000 years ago. In ancient Egypt, honey was used for everything from sweetening cakes to embalming the dead, and was a valuable trade good.

In more recent years, honey took a back seat to refined sugar in the preponderance of American kitchens when it came to cooking, baking and everyday sweetening. Refined sugar is cheaper, and every spoonful tastes pretty much like every other spoonful.

And therein lies the soul-crushing palate boredom. To make refined sugar, enormous fields of largely identical cane plants or sugar beets are harvested and processed into that white powder in your sugar bowl. The process is very well-documented and rigidly controlled for maximum profit. There's very little room for variation.

Bees? Well, they don't know from profit. They know flowers. And they don't particularly care if the honey filling their combs comes from one particular flower or 40 different ones. Therefore, you'll get different flavors not just from field to field, but often between boxes within a hive depending on what was blooming when. It's fantastic! To truly taste the flavors of your region, head out to your local farmer's market and find someone selling local wild or "raw" honey. It will quite likely be much darker than the stuff you're accustomed to finding at the grocery store, and the flavor will knock your socks off.

As a side note, there is a truckload of as-yet anecdotal evidence that eating local honey can help lessen the severity of pollen allergies. Since honey is in one sense a concentrated form of the allergen, the logic is that eating honey regularly will help "immunize" allergy sufferers to the local irritants. I've seen evidence of this working with my two young sons, whose springtime runny noses dropped to nearly nothing after a week of honey on toast for breakfast.

Refining The Process

Of course, we humans love to tinker with things, and it was inevitable that we'd try to find a way to fine-tune honeys and reliably get certain specific flavors out of them. That's where Marina Marchese and her colleagues around the world in the field of artisanal, single-source honeys come in. In this case, however, tinkering has not led to a more bland or less interesting product, but to a panoply of new tastes that beggar the mind with culinary possibilities.

The method for producing a single-source honey sounds simple enough: An apiarist loads her hives into a truck and moves them to where the bulk of the available flowers will be of the type desired shortly before the blooms open, then removes the hives when the flowers drop their petals and harvests the honey.

However, the real magic lies in what types of flowers are chosen, what Mother Nature has dealt in the way of a climate for the year and how healthy the bee colonies are. This year, for example, Marchese said the honey is fantastic thanks to the long, hot summer and only occasional rain in her New England region. Last year, with its long wet spells, didn't make for great honey. Rain washes out pollen and nectar, giving the bees less to work with.

If this sounds familiar to you, you probably know a little bit about wine production. Just like that other ancient product, honey relies primarily on nature to dictate quality and quantity.

So, what sorts of single-source honeys does Marchese's Red Bee Honey offer? Thanks to her partnerships with other artisanal honey producers, the variety is a bit dizzying. The ones currently on offer run the gamut from blueberry to orange blossom to Tupelo honey that would make Van Morrison weep for joy.

Of the ones I've tasted, my personal favorite was the tulip poplar. I detected several different levels of sweetness, each complementing the next but not building to a cloying level, and the finish was so mellow and pleasing that I understood why it's called the Port wine of honeys.

Basically, artisanal honeys are one of the few times in this overmerchandised, heavily marketed foodie world that you actually will get righteous bang for your buck when you pay for the good stuff. An 11-ounce bottle of the tulip poplar runs $12, and the flavor is so rich you'll rarely need more than a touch to get your desired effect.

If you're one of those who pays attention to your appearance, Red Bee also offers various honey-based skin scrubs, soaps and balms. I, however, being a manly sort, don't use such things ... also, she didn't send me any to review.

Don't Forget The Cheese

Wine and cheese parties were all the rage in the '80s, when well-heeled yuppies flaunted their bankrolls by decanting thousands of dollars worth of vino for their equally status-obsessed friends to quaff while nibbling on bits of queso.

Marina Marchese has a different idea: pairing cheeses (and other foods) with their appropriate honeys. She, in partnership with various chefs, is always working to find new and different matches between each year's honeys and the available cheeses and other nibbles. As you browse the honeys on the site, you'll notice that each one comes with several recommendations for pairings.

Personally, I can't wait to drizzle the last of my tulip poplar sample over some rice pudding. I've got just the bag of leftover rice in the fridge, in fact ...

While I head off to feed my sweet tooth, you head to Red Bee and load up a virtual shopping cart.

Got a question? Comment? Topic you'd like to see covered? Drop me a line, anytime!