I am up against a first time problem. Winter is coming to high desert Utah this weekend. I must remove the 6 supers from the 3 hives tomorrow . . . rabbit brush and other small flow is pretty much done anyway. I will have about 30 or so frames of capped honey. The remaining drawn out and mostly filled frames (around 24) will be largely uncapped and pretty "green" still. I will test to know just how green. Question is, can I stack those 3 supers over a light box in garage and let that heat and resulting thermal air flow finish the honey? I hate to freeze 120 pounds of honey/nectar but I will if this cobbled up remedy will not yield honey. Thanks for any help.
James
A crazy idea... Might work. Put a large box fan on a couple sawhorses, a large a/c fiberglass filter on top and stack supers on top of that. A couple days of that may cure it off. I wouldn't attempt it unless the air is really dry, honey can pull mosture out of the air if the humidity is greater than 60/70%.
The only other way would be evaporative boiling. extract and throw it into a pressure cooker, or other food safe pressurized vessel and apply vacume to it.
Either way, no way to be sure the moisture level is below 20% without a refractometer.
let the bees rob back the honey - the way to keep high moisture honey from fermenting is to heat to 145 deg. for 30 minutes (source the hive and the honey bee)-we all know that that is not the kind of honey you are after -let the bees pack it in for winter and enjoy what quality honey you where able to gather-RDY-B
Some follow up here. I stacked the 6 supers, about half of which were mostly full but only partially capped, over an empty super on a surplus hive bottom. Then placed a 75 watt light bulb in the empty box, covered the stack save be an inch gap for vent, and left them for 2 days. The uncapped honey read 20% moisture in refractometer at the start. After two days it was at 19% with the capped honey at 15%. I decided to extract mixing the fully capped frames with the uncapped ones in the radial extractor. The blended honey is settling now as we "speak" and it measured 16% in 2 buckets, and 17% in the third. I am very happy! I am sure it was the combination of the heat and vent, and the blending in the extractor. 13 more gallons of honey in this the third harvest from my 3 hives. Season total was 51 gallons or around 600 pounds . . . . more than twice the Utah state average. 70 degrees last two days and they're getting gobs of pollen somewhere, and I assume nectar too. Put top feeders on just in case I need to feed before winter sets in. Hive are heavy, but also still packed full of hungry mouths to feed. First valley snow fall (4 inches) was last Sunday. Hated that because trees are still full of green leaves and many branches broke off.