Sider Honey: What It Is Botanically, and What Monofloral Means
September 2, 2026 · The3Beez
Sider honey is among the most talked about honeys in the Arab world, and among the least clearly defined the moment anyone asks for a precise definition. Here are the botanical and laboratory facts as they appear in peer-reviewed research.
The tree
Sider is a common name for trees of the genus Ziziphus. The species most closely associated with sider honey in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula is Ziziphus spina-christi, and this is the species adopted by a study published in Food Analytical Methods in 2017 when describing authentic Yemeni sider samples. A wider survey published in the journal Applied Sciences in 2022, however, makes clear that sider honeys from different regions also come from other species in the same genus, among them Ziziphus jujuba and Ziziphus lotus. In other words, “sider” is the name of a genus more than the name of a single species.
What does “monofloral” mean?
The term is not an impressionistic description. The laboratory criterion adopted in the same study is that pollen from a single floral source must make up not less than 55% of the pollen in the sample. The researchers examined 794 samples from twelve regions, and the monofloral samples among them exceeded a threshold of 70% specific pollen. The description is therefore measurable and verifiable, not a matter of claim alone.
A distinctive measurable property
Blossom honeys are usually acidic, with a pH between 3.5 and 4.5, but a measurement published in 2025 in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems gave a Saudi sider sample a pH of 5.07, higher than the usual range for blossom honeys. A small detail, but a good example of how monofloral honeys do not always keep to the general averages.
What has no scientific source
It is common to pin the flowering season of Yemeni sider to particular months. I did not find this in any peer-reviewed research; the published papers on sider honey make no mention of flowering months at all, and the claim recurs only on retail websites. The closest published flowering data concern a different species, Ziziphus nummularia, in central Saudi Arabia. So the accurate way to put it is this: the seasonal timing is knowledge handed down among producers, not a published scientific figure.