I have a friend that puts a couple of pallets at a lavender farm each year. His honey house isn't set up to do small extractions so I do it for him each year. Usually he will bring 6 - 8 supers of capped lavender but this year was different. Over half was uncapped. I set these on a few of my strong colonies for a week hoping to get them capped but it didn't happen. The nector was not thin enough to shake out so I went ahead and extracted. I did the work in 2 batches. First was mostly capped and the second was all uncapped. I told him that the uncapped could ferment so dont mix them. It has been about a month now with no signs of fermentation. Anyone have any idea how long he should wait to be safe. He wants to cream all of it
How warm has it been where the honey is? If it hasn't started yet I'm not sure if it ever will.
Quote from: D Coates on September 29, 2011, 06:10:07 PM
How warm has it been where the honey is? If it hasn't started yet I'm not sure if it ever will.
being a long time brewer this was the first thing I told him was to keep it in the house near 70 degs. Although he told me it is noticeably thinner it is showing no signs of mold or fermentation after 30 days.
Flip side problem - a friend of mine has two mediums of capped honey that from the smell has fermented in the comb. If I extracted this, could I safely give the comb back to the bees? Should I air it for some time first? Gently hose it down then dry it? Could the fermented honey be used to make mead?
JC
Quote from: greenbtree on October 01, 2011, 03:23:13 PM
Flip side problem - a friend of mine has two mediums of capped honey that from the smell has fermented in the comb. If I extracted this, could I safely give the comb back to the bees? Should I air it for some time first? Gently hose it down then dry it? Could the fermented honey be used to make mead?
JC
It shouldn't ferment if its capped but if it did the co2 off gas would pop the cappings. More that likely you just have a smelly nectar source