Last year was my first year beekeeping and per several of your suggestions, I put a few bottles of last years honey harvest in the freezer. My baby shower is coming up in a few weeks and I was thinking that re-bottling this honey into little jars to give as shower favors might be a nice idea. However, this is my first time dealing with frozen honey. Is the quality going to be good once it's thawed? Will it granulate quickly, or will it remain liquid for a while. I don't want to send everyone home with "funky honey."
Thanks!
I'm not the most experienced person for answering this, but I don't want your question to get lost in cyberspace. I believe I have read that freezing honey actually prevents future crystallization. Not sure. It makes sense, though, since northern bees would be relying on their honey come early spring. What a great gift!
Put a stick in the jar and call it a honey popsicle. Or it should do fine to bottle. I now put suppers in the freezer for a couple of days before we extract.
If you are giving this honey away as a baby shower gift then make SURE that they know to NOT feed it to Babies 1 year old or younger.
I've never heard of putting honey in the freezer.
I freeze honey regularly. I use those little silicone ice trays with little shapes like flowers and stuff. I fill them with honey, cover the top with a mint leaf. They go from my freezer to tea. I cant speculate on crystallization , only that it rocks in tea and guests are freakishly impressed
I freeze the whole super to kill small hive beetles and moth eggs and other bugs.
Yes, freeze it, that will work perfectly!!!
It won't crystallize in the freezer.
I usually bottle in quart jars a lot at a time but then freeze it immediately so that it won't crystallize. Otherwise if I DON'T freeze, then I have to heat and reheat to make it look nicer and to make it un-cloudy.
The only caveat here is that you don't want any paper stickers or labels on the bottles - when you thaw it out the bottles will condensate something fierce and that water ruin any printed or paper labels.
When I have a bucket or jars that start to crystallize, I take them to the top of the stairs and store them in the attic for a few days. A 100 degree attic will clear up honey nice.
I am just a 2 hive keeper :shock: and I put whole supers in the freezer if I don't have time to process them during the flow. One year I didn't get to the last super until the next January and the honey was fine.