THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN UPDATED SINCE ORIGINALLY POSTED.
Some of our honey from 2011 has begun to crystallize in the bottles, specifically the extracted honey that was always cloudy. The crushed-and-strained honey is no longer perfectly clear like apple juice, but it’s still liquid.
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| LEFT: Crushed-and-strained honey from Sept. 27/11. RIGHT: Crystallized extracted honey from Oct. 03/11. |
If we had a bigger freezer, we would have frozen all the honey and taken out each bottle only as we needed it. Freezing honey puts it in suspended animation, right? Thus delaying the natural crystallization process? We may need to get a bigger freezer for next season. At any rate, I’ll update this post later in the year if the crushed-and-strained honey crystallizes. We could heat the honey to return it to liquid form, but we don’t mind it a little crystallized. It’s more creamy than solid, easier to spread on toast, and less messy. And it’s still fabulously more delicious than any grocery store honey.
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UPDATE: I bit the bullet and clarified most of our crystallized honey today by letting the bottles sit in hot water for a while like I did back on December 18th, 2011. Then I somehow found space for all the honey in our deep freeze. I still have a bottle of the crushed-and-strained honey in the cupboard so I can record the date when it fully crystallizes. My guess is it won’t take long because our kitchen this time of year is like a walk-in refrigerator when we’re not home. Refrigerated honey apparently crystallizes fast.
Our last batch of honey this year was cloudy probably because it went through a commercial extractor that hadn’t been cleaned for a while. (See Cloudy Honey for a further explanation.) Apparently (because I’m not certain), commercial beekeepers clarify their honey by heating it as high as 140°F / 60°C* (a process that also delays crystallization). So it doesn’t make any difference to them if their extracted honey comes out cloudy; they just heat it. I know I’m still new at this beekeeping racket, but to my thinking, heating honey is bad news no matter how you look at it. Whether the extreme heat of pasteurization that transforms honey into plastic-flavoured grocery store goo, or the lower heat used only to clarify honey, I would think both processes either completely remove or diminish the compounds in the honey that preserve the unique floral flavours and aromas. I wonder if I’m correct in that thinking.
I don’t fault commercial beekeepers who have little choice but to meet market demands. The market for some reason demands honey that always looks clear and pretty on grocery store shelves, even if it means destroying most of the natural and beneficial properties of the honey. But given the choice, I’d pick the unprocessed honey every time. Why? Because it’s about a billion times better than honey that’s had everything that was ever good in it heated and filtered out of it. Not that every beekeeper who heats their honey is ruining their honey. 40°C, if that’s typical, doesn’t seem extreme. But 60°C does.
Read on . . . »
THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN UPDATED SINCE ORIGINALLY POSTED.
Our first batches of honey this year were crushed and strained from foundationless honey supers in September. The honey has pleasant floral aromas and flavours and is mildly sweet, not overpowering. It’s easy to take. The honey was cloudy with bubbles when we first bottled it but quickly cleared up and took on the appearance of apple juice and still looks the same today. Our last batch of honey was extracted in October using a local commercial beekeeper’s extractor. That honey was cloudy and has remained cloudy. The floral flavours and aromas are dialled down to 8 instead of 10, but are generally unaffected. It’s easy to tell what honey came from the extractor, though. Both of these photos were taken today:
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| Extracted honey (from October 2011). |
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| Crushed and strained honey (from September 2011). |
So why is the extracted honey cloudy? Well…
Read on . . . »
THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN UPDATED SINCE ORIGINALLY POSTED.
I’m asking because I don’t know.
I’m in New Brunswick at the moment. I picked up a jar of honey at a grocery store this morning. The honey is from a local apiary. The label on the honey jar reads “Pure liquid Canadian honey — Canada No. 1 White.” And that means… what exactly? Is the honey pasteurized or heated? Is it ultra-filtered? What does “pure liquid honey” actually mean? Whatever it is, it tastes like melted plastic to me, at least when I compare it to the raw honey from our hives.
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What is it that makes grocery store honey, even “pure liquid honey,” taste more like a bottle of Elmer’s Glue than honey? Does heating the honey, whether to pasteurize or clarify it, kill all the goodness in it? Or does large-scale blending of honey from various hives through a single extractor result in a homogenous honey, a honey with a consistent — but bland — flavour?
I don’t know. But I sure do like our honey.
UPDATE (Dec. 09/11): Here are some informed responses to this post (much more informed than me anyway): Honey so bland it’s boring; So, What is Honey, Really? – Part 2; Pasteurizing honey… whatever for?; So, What is Honey, Really? – Part 3. And if you like that, you might also find this interesting: So is it honey or not?
We pulled four deep frames of honey from each of our hives this past summer to prevent the queens from becoming honey bound. We stored the frames in a cardboard nuc box and kept them in our house. Later in the fall we fed all but one of the frames back to the bees (see Feeding The Bees Honey Instead of Syrup). This morning I took a look at the remaining deep frame of honey stored in the nuc box and noticed it had mould growing on it.
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Damn.
Read on . . . »
Here’s a short uneventful video I took of the hives today where I mistakenly refer to Hive #2 as Hive #1. (I need to paint numbers on the damn things.)
And now here’s a quick review of the 4 hives in our backyard as they stand today:
Read on . . . »
THE FOLLOWING WAS LAST UPDATED ON DEC. 14, 2011.
Here’s a 2-minute video that shows another beekeeper, then us, extracting some honey a few days ago:
See Extracting Honey for all the details.
UPDATE (Nov. 06/11): It’s been a month since we extracted and bottled the honey — and it’s still cloudy. All the honey we bottled from crushing and straining earlier in September turned perfectly clear easily within 10 days of bottling (it looks like apple juice). I’m not sure why the extracted honey hasn’t become clear, though I suspect it’s because it was inevitably mixed with a different type of honey that was left over in the extractor before we used it.
UPDATE (Dec. 14/11): See Cloudy Honey for a fuller explanation.
We extracted the last eight frames from our honey bee hives this weekend. It came to about 8 litres after bottling. That’s somewhere around 25 pounds or 11kg. We extracted the honey with another beekeeper who got into beekeeping last summer the same time we did. He went before of us. Some of the following photos are of his honey — starting with this one:
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The honey on his frames probably came from Goldenrod nectar. The appearance of the Goldenrod honey comb was different than our comb. The flavour of the honey was more earthy too. Our honey probably came from Japanese Knotweed and other floral sources that aren’t as distinctive as Goldenrod. It’s all good honey, though. At any rate, step one was to put all the frames in a rack on the decapping table.
Read on . . . »
Someone asked me, “What do you mean by ‘capped’ honey?” My answer: Capped honey is like anything that has a cap on it, like a jar of jam, for instance. If the jar of jam didn’t have a cap on it, it would dry up, go mouldy, turn rancid, start to ferment, etc. Bees are like that with their honey. First they build comb consisting of thousand of hexagonal shaped cells — those are the jars. Each cell in turn is filled with nectar. The bees evaporate the nectar until its reduced to a thick sweet liquid that we call honey. When it’s just right, they seal up the cell with a layer of wax often referred to as a cap, just like the lid on a jar of jam. Here’s a photo showing a frame of honey with cells that are capped and not yet capped. (Is “uncapped” the same as “not yet capped”? Let’s just say it is.)
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The open cells are uncapped. Most of the cells in middle of the frame are capped. Hence, capped honey, sometimes referred to as fully cured honey.
P.S.: There’s also dry cappings and wet cappings. The ones in the above photo are dry cappings. Here’s what I think may be wet cappings and dry cappings. See Wet cappings vs dry cappings at Honey Bee Suite for more on that.
THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH NEW PHOTOS SINCE ORIGINALLY POSTED.
Here’s a narrated video of us harvesting the last five foundationless frames from our hives this year. We cut out 28 small squares of honey comb from a little over 1 and a half frames. We crushed and strained the rest of it and bottled it the next day.
We meant to strain the crushed comb using the 3-bucket system that requires a paint strainer, but we put the paint strainer on the wrong bucket (the paint strainer goes on the bottom bucket), so we had to improvise a bit. That mistake cost us some honey, but it wasn’t too drastic.
P.S.: The Eating Raw Honey Comb video isn’t a bad following-up to this video.
Read on . . . »
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