The TERRA MELLIS association was founded in 2020 by a group of honey enthusiasts – Ligia Soare, Dorina Oarga and Laurentiu Brătan. Over time, I attended various events dedicated to honey (especially bee fairs) in Romania. Also, in numerous trips I discovered many types of honey, from extremely diverse geo-climatic areas: from Indochina to the Caribbean, from South America to Central Asia and from the Horn of Africa to Europe.
Lost in this fascinating universe, we tried to find information about the types of honey found and their characteristics, but in most cases we noticed that the information found is either extremely brief or completely missing. And often they are contradictory.
Things are not better at the bee fairs either. When you buy a certain type of honey from a producer, you expect the information provided to be at a certain professional level. However, experiences have shown us the opposite many times – many producers only know the types of honey they produce and only to a certain extent; and I know next to nothing about other areas, other countries… and even less about other continents.
Therefore, our first project appeared as a result of a need: to find credible, substantiated and professional information about as many types of honey as possible . This is how the idea of establishing this online honey encyclopedia arose, which would identify, inventory, document and classify the existing types of honey – first from Romania, then from Europe, and finally from all over the world.
Such encyclopedias/databases exist (in print or online) for other foods or beverages – cheese, coffee, spices, wine, whiskey. So why wouldn’t there be for honey too?