My wife and I took it literally, the “honey” in honeymoon. We came home from Europe with six jars of honey, which sounds excessive unless you’re Winnie the Pooh. Or us.

Because the jars had to go into our checked luggage, we wrapped them in bubble wrap and again in plastic bags and stuffed them in hiking socks, which we wrapped again in T-shirts and fleeces. We did the same thing with our walnut and lemon liqueurs and other liquid souvenirs, and winced as the backpacks got thrown onto conveyor belts at Charles de Gaulle, at Dublin, and at O’Hare. But mercifully everything made it through unbroken: the Ligurian limoncino, the Provencal liqueur de noix, and the six golden jars of bee-made glee.

We wrapped them in bubble wrap and again in plastic bags and stuffed them in hiking socks, which we wrapped again in T-shirts and fleeces.

“Six golden jars” makes it sound like a fairy tale—“and so the pauper and his wife returned to their hovel with six golden jars and lived happily ever after.” It was. (I’m imagining the giant’s wife making a giant pot of forest tea, reaching into her cupboard to find it bare. Her husband folds down his newspaper and asks, “What’s the matter?”) They were jars we’d hauled with us for weeks, the product of thousands of bees and thousands of flowers and tens of thousands of bits of pollen and nectar, and so in that sense they were as precious as gold.

But don’t let “golden” confuse you about the color. They ranged in color from argent to umber, and in texture from solid to liquid. (Now I’m imagining what a cloud of honey, honey in the gaseous state, would be like. No doubt an Iron Chef has already made this.) These weren’t six identical non-descript honeys in bear-shaped squeeze bottles. Please. We wouldn’t have bothered. Five were monofloral, taken from hives that worked primarily on a single kind of flower.

The lightest was a rosemary honey, of a creamy opaque silver. It tasted delicate and buttery, with only the vaguest hint, not even of rosemary, but of the limestone under the Mediterranean scrublands known as the garrigue. Rosemary itself tastes bright and pronounced, almost bitter—no wonder it’s an anti-depressant—but the honey tasted nothing of rosemary. If you went looking for it, you could taste the aromatic air of walking through the garrigue, which is similar to chaparral in California in that both share an inscrutable spiciness that manages to be both earthy and heady at the same time. Sounds precious, but it’s true. Mostly it was like tasting a pleasant seaside breeze, which is essential what “rosemary” means—the dew of the sea.

The lavender honey was a tone less pale, a degree more yellow, but just as creamy and delicate. It tasted like lavender. (“The snozzberries taste like snozzberry!”) The thyme honey came in the largest jar, for good reason. There was chestnut honey, sharp and dark, and white oak honey, which smells like wood. And the last was not a single-flower honey, but a single-valley honey, from the Buranco Valley by the town of Monterosso al Mare. One valley, with grapes for wine, olives for oil, and lemon trees for everything. Garlic and tomatoes grown in steep terraces, and honey that tastes of summer afternoons. The freshest fish my wife and I have ever had, a little olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, a crisp white. The wine bottle pressed against my sun-burned neck. And for dessert, a little cheese, a drizzle of honey. Happily ever after.