Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In Spain my honey sales relied on the fact that I used this simple process. I had
information on the label (in Spanish, of course) that my honey was cold filtered, thus
maintaining all the product's goodness and value. It worked, and people chose my honey
over others just because of this. That was using a cheap, stainless-steel filter hung over
the honey bin and, later, the much easier but same principle Strainaway
®
system.
Pre- and post-harvest work
Occasionally with some crops, such as oil seed rape/canola, the honey crystallizes very
swiftly and may even crystallize in the comb unless extracted as soon as it is capped
over. If this happens and you end up with some solid combs of crystallized honey, it is
probably best to break the combs up and melt them in a large container set in a hot-
water bath - a sort of huge bain-marie. This bath should be heated from below and,
eventually, the comb and honey will melt. This can then be poured into buckets and
recycled or sold.
Another way of sorting out this problem is to place the frames of comb into a warm
room for sufficient time for them to loosen up. Most of you, however, won't have
this facility. If you are in an area of a crop such as this, you should check your hives
frequently and take off the supers of honey individually when they are three quarters
full. In other words, you can't do them all at the end of the season.
Another problem you may encounter is that you find brood in the honey supers. This
means the queen excluder has failed, probably as a result of damage by your hive tool,
and the queen has gone up into the supers. She may still be there or she may have been
damaged when you used a fume board or brush to remove the bees prior to taking the
supers off. If you see brood in the honey supers, check the hive it came from (if you
know).
Now that you have extracted your honey and poured it into your honey buckets or bins,
you should cap it tightly. Honey is hygroscopic and will absorb moisture from the air.
The following points should now be noted.
