10-18-2021 Planning Commission Packet

Home Browse Search

PROPERTIES OF HONEY 1110 • Every honey has a delicious, unique flavor that reflects the time of year and floral landscape in which it was produced. • Honey is viscous. Viscous is a fancy word that basically means thick when cold and runny when warm. This property is important to remember when extracting and handling honey. Warm honey will be easier to extract and strain than cold honey. • Honey contains less than 18.6% moisture. If you remove something that looks like honey, feels like honey and tastes like honey but has more than 18.6% moisture, it will most likely ferment in a short time. If left on the bee colony, the bees will lower the moisture content for you. If it is not possible to leave the supers on a colony, lower the moisture content by using a dehumidifier and fan in a small room with the supers. Interestingly, bees change the chemical properties of nectar themselves as they dehydrate nectar into honey. Advanced honey testing can detect when a person uses a dehumidifier compared to when the bees themselves reduce the moisture level. Beekeeping organizations and suppliers may have a refractometer available to measure honey moisture content. • Honey is hygroscopic. Hygroscopic means that honey will absorb moisture from the surrounding air if left uncovered. If the honey absorbs too much moisture it may ferment. • Honey will granulate or crystallize. Honey granulates at different rates depending on the plants from which the nectar has been collected. Refrigeration accelerates the crystallization process. There are ways to slow down or speed up the process of granulation, but it is inevitable. Honey does not "go bad"when it granulates. To liquefy honey, warm (don't heat) to about 110-150°F. Honey is made up of different sugars. Most can liquify at 110°F; however, some will require heating to 150°F. Overheating or fermentation can damage the honey's flavor. To protect flavor, we highly recommend that you do not • heat honey over 120°F. EXTRACTING HONEY Equipment • Uncapping the honey is the first step in extracting. You need at least one of the following: capping scratcher, uncapping knife, uncapping plane or automatic uncapper. You will also need an uncapping tray to catch the wax cappings. • You will need an extractor, either power or hand crank, to extract the honey. This centrifugal device spins out the honey from the wax cells without destroying the comb structure. Extractors come in radial or tangential types. The radial type will extract both sides of the comb at the same time. The tangential type will require that frames be manually turned around to get both sides extracted. • As the honey comes out of the extractor, strain it into a bucket or other receptacle. Your strainer can be a coarse screen to get the large pieces of wax, a nylon cloth to strain all the wax, or a double screen (a course screen with a finer screen below). Straining produces a clean product by removing debris and wax pieces. • Filtering honey is a different process that removes pollen grains and other particles that are 1 micron and larger. Filtering is normally done by large-scale honey packers, and is not necessary or recommended for small-scale beekeepers. • • You will need to store your honey somewhere until you bottle it. Depending on your honey harvest, this may be quart jars, gallon jugs, 5 gallon pails, 55 gallon barrels, or a tanker. You may find it is easier to liquefy crystallized honey stored in glass rather than plastic. Beekeeping in Northern Climates 65