Country Life

Don Shump, owner of Philadelphia Bee Co., has tended hives around the city for more than a decade, harvesting and selling neighborhood-specific varieties, donning bee beards at educational workshops, and extracting colonies of honeybees, wasps, and hornets from places they don’t belong. One day in fall 2019—right around the time the first adult spotted lanternfly populations exploded in Philadelphia—he entered the honey house, where a coworker was processing the harvest, and was hit with an unfamiliar aroma.

“It smelled like maple bacon,” Shump says. “I didn't know what these girls had gotten into, but it was something different.”

The harvest looked different, too: thick in texture with a deep reddish-brown color. Late summer and fall, when asters, goldenrod, and Japanese knotweed are in bloom, is the season for dark honey. But Shump had never seen anything like this, and beekeepers around Southeast Pennsylvania were seeing the same thing—an unusually dark harvest with a surprisingly smoky, robust flavor.

This is wild. Spotted lanternflies are giving honey a delicious smoked taste in Southeast Pennsylvania.