Honey For Dummies. Howland Blackiston

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of Howland Blackiston

      FIGURE 2-5: This illustration shows the anatomy of a typical beehive. The surplus honey that is harvested comes from the top boxes, called “honey supers.”

      HONEY IS HYGROSCOPIC

A substance is hygroscopic if it absorbs moisture from the air. Honey is one of those hygroscopic substances. On the positive side, this is why baked goods made with honey stay moist and fresh. It’s also why honey is used in cosmetics as a moisturizer. On the negative side, being hygroscopic means you must keep your honey containers tightly sealed; otherwise, your honey will absorb moisture from the air, become diluted, and eventually ferment. That’s why the bees seal the honeycomb cells with an airtight lid of beeswax.

      Driving the bees out of the honey supers

      Before beekeepers can extract the honey and bottle it, they must remove the bees from the frame’s honeycomb. Beekeepers certainly don’t need to bring thousands of bees into their extraction and bottling facility!

      Removing bees from honeycomb can be accomplished in many different ways. But for commercial beekeepers (those with over 300 hives) and even for hobbyists with ten or more hives, the fastest and most practical way is to use a fume board. It looks like a hive cover, but it has an absorbent flannel inner lining. A liquid bee repellent is applied to the flannel lining, and the fume board is placed on top of the honey supers on a warm day. After just a few minutes, the bees are repelled out of the honey supers and down into the brood chamber. Instant success! The honey supers can then be safely removed and taken to the designated workspace for removing the honey from the comb.

      Removing the honey from the comb

After collecting the frames of capped honeycomb (sans bees), beekeepers (large and small) follow the same process (illustrated in Figure 2-6) to get the honey out of the comb and bottle it. Only the scale of operations and size of equipment change. Here’s how the process works for both:

      1 After removing the bees and bringing the honey supers into a workspace, the beekeeper removes each frame of capped honey from the supers.

      2 A handheld knife or uncapping machine is used to slice off the wax cappings and expose the cells of ripened honey.This process is called uncapping.

      3 An uncapping fork (or similar device) is used to get any cells missed by the knife or uncapping machine.

      4 Once the frames are uncapped, they are placed in a centrifugal extractor.As the frames spin, the honey is forced out of the cells and dribbles down the walls of the extractor into a holding area.

      5 The honey is drained from the extractor, filtered, put into airtight containers, and labeled.

      Photography by Howland Blackiston (top) and www.cooknbeals.com (bottom)

      FIGURE 2-6: These photos show the process for both a hobbyist beekeeper and a commercial operation. The steps are similar; only the scale of operations and size of equipment varies.

Chapter 3

      Appreciating the Different Styles of Honey

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Getting to know the four main styles of honey

      

Understanding crystallization

      

Making your own creamed honey

      Honey comes in thousands of different varieties, really as many as there are different flowers. In Chapter 7 I profile 50 of the most popular varieties of honey. When you purchase honey, regardless of the variety, honey can be presented as one of several different styles. In this chapter we’re talking about the different styles of honey. And there are only four style variations: comb honey, extracted honey, chunk honey and whipped honey. They are all worth a try and enjoyed in different ways.

      

In time, nearly all honeys form granulated crystals. There is nothing wrong with honey that has crystallized. It’s perfectly okay to eat it in this form. However, if you want to get it back to the liquid state, crystallized honey can be easily liquefied by placing the jar in warm (not hot) water and stirred.

      

Don’t ever be tempted to heat plastic honey jars. The plastic can leech into the honey causing it to smell and taste like, you guessed it, like plastic. And besides, the chances are pretty good that you’ll wind up with a deformed plastic bottle. For this reason, we recommend you always purchase your honey in glass containers.

Walkin’ Talkin’ Honeycomb

Comb honey (see Figure 3-1) is the jewel of the beehive — and carries a high retail price as a result. It’s honey just as the bees made it, still in the comb. In many countries, honey in the comb is considered the only authentic honey untouched by humans while retaining all its pollen, propolis, and the natural health benefits associated with raw honey (never extracted, strained or touched by humans). When you uncap those tiny airtight beeswax cells, the honey inside is exposed to the air for the very first time since the bees stored it.

      Photo by Howland Blackiston

      FIGURE 3-1: This is beautiful, natural honeycomb, just as it comes from the hive.

      Encouraging bees to make large quantities of honeycomb is a bit tricky. The bees need a very strong nectar flow to get them going and controlled space arrangements inside the hive. There must be many warm, sunny days and just the right amount of rain to produce a bounty of flowering plants. The tricky part is controlling the bees’ urge to swarm in tight conditions during a heavy nectar flow. Harvesting comb honey is less time-consuming for the beekeeper than harvesting extracted honey (but more labor for the bees); one simply removes the entire honeycomb and packages it. As a consumer, you eat the whole thing: both the honey and the beeswax. It’s all edible!

Savoring Liquid Gold — Extracted Honey

Extracted

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