We followed the bees. They led us up.

The first comb came from Bingöl, in the far east of Türkiye, where the Euphrates begins as snowmelt. But the bees did not stop at one province, and neither did we. Today we follow wild colonies across the high country of Anatolia: the limestone ranges of the east, the oak forests of the interior, the alpine meadows that run from the Black Sea mountains to the Taurus. Summers up there are short and violent with flowers, a hundred species that bloom together for six weeks and are gone. The honey that comes from them has a density, and a bitterness at the edges, that lowland honey never carries. It tastes of altitude, and of the whole country.

We do not keep hives. We do not feed sugar. We do not extract, pump, fine-filter or warm the honey; it leaves the comb by gravity alone and settles in stone rooms until it is ready. We do not take brood comb, and we do not return to a colony in the same season. If a colony looks thin, we photograph it, note the place, and climb down empty-handed. All of this adds up to about four kilograms of honey a year. It is not a business model; it is a limit, and we keep to it.

Wild honey is the easiest honey in the world to fake and the hardest to prove. So every batch, before it is offered, is sealed with its own number and sent to an independent, accredited laboratory for adulteration, HMF, enzyme activity, residue and pollen analysis. The report belongs to the jar. Ask for it with your batch number and we will send it.

Lal is an old word for a deep red stone, and for the moment when someone is too moved to speak. Both felt right.