Honey Production by Country

Data

💡 Note: How Honey Production Works

Honey is one of the very few foods humans still harvest in basically the same way they did thousands of years ago: a colony of bees gathers nectar, converts it, and stores it in wax. Everything in the table above comes down to how many healthy colonies a country can keep — and how much of the harvest beekeepers take out of the hive.

From flower to jar, in five steps

• Gathering: a forager bee collects nectar that is 70 to 80 percent water, sucking it up through her proboscis and storing it in her honey stomach.
• Enzymes: back at the hive the nectar is passed between bees; enzymes such as invertase split the complex sugar sucrose into glucose and fructose.
• Evaporation: workers deposit the thin liquid into hexagonal wax cells and fan it with their wings until the water content drops to around 18 percent.
• Capping: once it is thick enough to keep from fermenting, cells are sealed with a thin layer of wax. That sealed honey is food for the winter.
• Harvest: beekeepers uncap and spin out the surplus, leaving enough for the colony to survive the cold months, or replacing it with sugar syrup.

Two different raw materials

Most honey comes from floral nectar, but a large and prized share comes from honeydew — sugary droplets excreted by aphids and other sap-sucking insects. Turkey's famous pine honey (çam balı) is honeydew honey made from pine forests rather than flowers, and it helps explain why Turkey sits at number three on the list with a solid 1.1 kg of honey produced per person.

Why honey lasts forever

Honey's high sugar concentration leaves almost no water for microbes, and its pH is acidic. Those two properties together make it one of the only natural foods that essentially never spoils; jars recovered from ancient Egyptian tombs have still been edible after thousands of years. Crystallisation is not spoilage — it is just glucose settling out, and a warm water bath reverses it.

The numbers are big, the output per bee is tiny

• A worker bee lives only a few weeks in summer and produces roughly a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life — a figure widely quoted in beekeeping literature.
• To make a single pound of honey, a colony commonly travels the equivalent of about 55,000 miles of flight, visiting flowers by the million.
• A strong hive yields somewhere around 20 to 40 kg of surplus honey in a good season. Divide a country's total by its hive count and you get an average in the tens of kilos, not tonnes.
• That is why a country with millions of smallholder hives — Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Angola — can rank above industrialised economies.

Total production vs. production per person

Total tonnage answers "who supplies the market?", while the per-person column answers "who really uses honey at home?" The two lists look completely different. China produces 444,800 tonnes, about 22 percent of the 2.0 million tonnes harvested worldwide in 2024, but that works out to only 0.3 kg for each of its 1.4 billion people — the bulk is blended and exported. Greece, with 24,841 tonnes, reaches 2.3 kg per person, the highest rate in the table, because thyme and pine honey are part of everyday eating rather than a bulk commodity. Argentina and China dominate exports; the United States is the mirror image, producing 60,960 tonnes but importing roughly 255,000 tonnes to satisfy a market that consumed more than 300,000 tonnes in 2024.

Regional character

• China — acacia, linden, rapeseed and vitex honeys from different provinces, much of it blended for export.
• Ethiopia — the biggest producer in Africa, with traditional log and top-bar hives and a celebrated pale "white honey" from the Tigray highlands; a lot of the crop becomes tej, honey wine.
• Iran, Turkey, Greece — mountain and pine honeys with strong local brands and high domestic demand.
• Ukraine and Russia — huge sunflower acreage; sunflower honey is pale, mild and produced at scale.
• Mexico — Yucatán jungle honey, an export staple since the 19th century.
• New Zealand — barely a rounding error in tonnage, but mānuka honey commands some of the highest prices per jar in the world.

The bigger business is pollination

Honey is almost a by-product for many commercial beekeepers. Almond orchards in California alone rent well over a million hives every February, and hive rental fees often earn a beekeeper more than the honey the same colonies produce. Honey bees pollinate a large share of the fruit, nut and vegetable crops that depend on insect visitors, which is why bee health is treated as an agricultural issue rather than a niche hobby. The main threats are the Varroa destructor mite and colony collapse disorder; as of 2025 the western honey bee was assessed as "Data Deficient" on the IUCN Red List, meaning scientists still lack the data to judge its global status.

Practical tips and reading the chart

• Never give honey to infants under one year — it can carry Clostridium botulinum spores that infant guts cannot handle.
• "Raw" and "monofloral" are about treatment and nectar source, not quality grades; lighter honeys are usually milder, darker ones more assertive.
• Store honey in a dry, sealed jar at room temperature. Fridge storage speeds up crystallisation, and moisture is honey's real enemy.
• Exactly 100 percent of the honey in the table is harvested honey. Wild colonies make honey too, but nobody counts it.
• Seventeen countries in this top 20 produce more than 30,000 tonnes each — honey is now a serious agricultural export, not just a farm-side extra.