Watermelon Honey Baklava

We love getting these types of messages from our customers. When the honey is so good they just have to share the results.

Katherine, we are so glad you came back to tell us. And we're even more glad you said yes when we asked if we could share your recipe with the world.

Baklava — those layered, honey-soaked phyllo pastries has been made across the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries. The syrup poured over the top is everything: it soaks into every flaky layer and carries the flavor of the whole dish. Most versions call for a fairly neutral honey. Katherine had a different idea.

She used our raw Watermelon Honey — a light, floral varietal with a subtle fruitiness that we source from California beekeepers — in place of the standard honey called for in the cinnamon syrup. The result, by her own account, was phenomenal. We believe it.

Watermelon honey has a delicate sweetness that doesn't overpower. It complements warm spices without competing with them. In a cinnamon syrup, it adds a brightness and depth that a generic store-bought honey simply can't match. That's what raw, terroir-driven honey does.

Katherine's Watermelon Honey Baklava

The base recipe comes from Mediterranean Flavors by Nick Stellino — a book worth having on any kitchen shelf. Katherine makes it her own with two important tweaks: she doubles both the nut filling and the syrup, because she, correctly, knows that more is more. And she swaps in our watermelon honey wherever the recipe calls for honey.

Where Does Watermelon Honey Actually Come From?

Watermelon honey isn't flavored or infused — it's what happens when honeybees forage primarily on watermelon blossoms during bloom season. The nectar from those flowers is what the bees collect, transform, and store in the hive. The resulting honey carries a subtle, clean sweetness with a faint floral fruitiness that sets it apart from clover or wildflower varietals. It's terroir in a jar: you're tasting a specific place, a specific bloom, a specific season in California's Central Valley.

Our watermelon honey is sourced from trusted California beekeepers — the same state that ranks among the top three watermelon-producing states in the entire country, harvesting hundreds of millions of pounds of watermelons annually as part of the U.S.'s 3.7-billion-pound domestic crop.

Why Watermelons Can't Exist Without Bees

Here's something worth understanding about that jar: the bees that made your honey are the same reason watermelons exist at all.

Watermelons don't self-pollinate. They produce separate male and female flowers on the same plant, and pollen has to be physically carried from one to the other. Watermelons rely almost exclusively on bees to move their pollen — without bees transporting it, male flowers would release their pollen in vain with no pollination occurring. No pollination, no fruit.

The numbers are striking. A female watermelon flower needs around 500 to 1,000 pollen grains to be fertilized effectively — requiring a minimum of 8 visits by a honeybee for seeded varieties. For the seedless watermelons that now dominate supermarket shelves, even more visits are needed: 16 to 24 per flower, because the pollen from seedless plants isn't viable and must be transferred from specially planted pollinizer rows. And watermelon flowers are only open for a matter of hours each morning, so those visits have to happen on the right day, at the right time, every day throughout the bloom period.

This is why commercial watermelon growers bring in honeybee hives — typically one to two per acre during flowering season. Most large-scale operations depend primarily on managed honeybee colonies for pollination because they are relatively easy to obtain, and a large number of bees can be introduced into a planting. A single strong hive can have 40,000 to 60,000 field bees working at once. That scale, combined with the fact that hives can be transported to fields as needed, makes honeybees the practical backbone of commercial watermelon agriculture.

Wait — Aren't Bumblebees Better at This?

You may have heard this, and it's true. Compared to a honeybee, bumblebees are about 10 times more efficient as a pollinator due to their size, the speed at which they transfer pollen, their efficiency within various crops, and their increased endurance to fly in adverse weather for longer periods of time. Bumblebees can also perform something called buzz pollination — vibrating their bodies at a specific frequency to shake pollen loose from flower anthers — a technique honeybees don't use.

So why aren't bumblebees running the show? Practicality. Although individual bumblebees are more efficient than individual honeybees, these advantages are overcome by the much larger numbers of honeybees present when managed hives are placed in a field. Commercial bumblebee colonies are also more expensive to rent. When you need to pollinate hundreds of acres reliably, honeybees win on logistics and economics — even if they're not the most efficient bee in the field.

The science on this is well-documented. The Xerces Society, using field research from UC Berkeley, has studied native and managed bee pollination of watermelon crops specifically in California — and their findings confirm that while native bees and bumblebees are valuable, honeybees remain the essential managed pollinator for large-scale production. Read their California watermelon pollination fact sheet →

What This Means for Your Jar of Honey

When you buy watermelon honey from SAVAGE BEE-CHES®, you're participating in a system that goes beyond the hive. The California beekeepers we work with aren't just producing honey their bees are actively supporting one of the state's most important fruit crops. Every watermelon in your summer fruit salad, every slice at a backyard barbecue, every pound of the hundreds of millions harvested in California each year got there because bees showed up, flower by flower, morning by morning.

Raw honey is a byproduct of that relationship. Buying it supports the beekeepers who keep managed colonies healthy, mobile, and available to the farms that need them. It's a small, delicious way to invest in the food system. And when it ends up in a baklava syrup that someone calls "phenomenal" — well, that's just a bonus.

Further reading: USDA Economic Research Service — U.S. Watermelon Production 2024 →

A Note on the Honey

Our Watermelon Honey is a raw varietal we carry in limited quantities. It's never filtered or pasteurized — everything that makes it distinctive is still intact. Strained, minimally processed, and sourced from beekeepers we trust across California.

If you'd like to taste it before you bake, we offer guided honey tastings at our Old Town San Diego boutique, Thursday through Sunday, 1–5pm. You'll know immediately why Katherine chose it for this.