- Hi everybody.
We're in our hot room.
And this is a stack of honey that we've just harvested.
We move the honey in here to make it nice and warm so it flows well.
But I wanna talk to you today about moisture in honey and some ways to deal with it.
We'll show you how we deal with high moisture honey.
And some of these principles can be adapted in different ways in your own locations.
So the first thing we do when we harvest honey in the fall of the year is we cross-pile the
boxes.
So we separate the boxes and we stack them over in a way that the air can flow through,
from top to bottom on the supers.
In the fall of the year, we're harvesting all the boxes, whether they're full or not.
So that some of these will be only partially full, and only partially ripe.
In summer, it's a little bit different, we're able to be a little bit more selective in
what we take off.
And the air temperature's warmer, and the humidity only such that we typically don't
have high moisture content in the honey.
Fall's a bit different.
This is when we can have a problem with high moisture honey.
So we cross-pile the boxes to get the air moving through.
And then we are able to get that moisture level down with the air moving through in
a warm room.
We have a really good sized fan here that blows that air through these stacks, so that
it moves up and through the supers.
If it's a really high moisture honey, we'll run a dehumidifier as well.
Just looking at this box here, the outside frames, the moisture level will be higher.
We use bee escapes on our colonies so these supers don't have any bees in them for a day
or so when we use the bee escape.
If honey evaporates, or nectar evaporates in here, some of it can condense, and it would
condense more so on the outside than the inside.
And the bees tend to have the honey right through the middle anyway.
So if we're to test the moisture with a refractometer, this would be higher than the honey in here.
This could even be as high as 20% or more.
And the middle might be 16 or so.
What we're shooting for is an average of 17.8% moisture, or less.
If it's lower than that it will not ferment, so that's what we're looking for.
If this honey sits here for any length of time, and that high moisture honey on outside
frames, it can ferment in the box.
So we're really careful to make sure we don't extract frames that could have fermentation.
We look for things like little bubbles in the honey.
If the honey is capped, even capped honey can ferment.
But in capped honey, you'll see some honey leaking out, and running down on the surface
of the comb.
So visually we can see fermentation, but we can also typically smell it, and for sure
taste it.
So we smell, we taste, we look.
And try and make sure we don't get any frames extracted that have fermentation.
Even just a few frames can put the flavor of the honey off.
You can taste that fermentation.
So I'll just set that box down there.
One way we like to do things is we'll get the honey down to where we think it's good,
then we'll extract several loads in our extractor.
And then test the moisture level after.
That way we're getting an average moisture content.
We can't figure out where the moisture level is at by testing frames, we have to extract
some honey first.
Once we've done that and the moisture level looks good in that extracted honey, then we
carry on.
But if it's not good, we pause, we run the dehumidifier longer, we run the fans longer,
and we dry that honey down.
Honey that's in the comb has a lot of surface area to it.
So any of those open cells there, and all that surface is exposed, and it can dry down
with the moving of the dry air that's moving through it.
Once honey is extracted and it's inside a jar, there's almost nothing you can do to
reduce the moisture levels.
You have to do it at this stage.
Just a few tips that work for us.
Thanks very much for watching.
We'll see you another time.