Crystalised Honey

[max2]

I made the mistake of putting some of our honey into 20 l buckets ( they hold about 25 kg) before I found the 10l buckets.
Now, with cooler mornings a lot of my honey has crystallized in the buckets.
My warming box heats to about 45C and takes many days to fully decrystalise all the honey.
I have seen heat blankets for sale for this purpose - not for me.
The honey in 1kg jars liquifies quite easily in about 24 hours. It is the large buckets which I find challenging.
I will be on the look-out for an old chest freezer and use it with a heating mat, a thermostat and and the buckets on top of a false floor. I will knock out the compressor.
We have a huge chest freezer we use for home kills but I have not seen them in the recycling place.
I will use my wax melter as a trial. I have an accurate thermometer I will use. I can fit two x 10l buckets into my wax melter. It has  nice temperature control and I will start off very low and increase it  and keep a close eye on it.
Any other, cheap, gently heating ideas?

[Lesgold]

Hi Max,

Like you, I store honey in 10l buckets. I also stored some honey in a few 20l buckets when I ran out of the smaller ones. They are much more difficult to work with. I plan to heat the larger buckets overnight until they soften sufficiently before dumping the honey into the smaller containers. It will mean double handling but I would prefer to do that and save time and effort in the long run.

[NigelP]

50C with a fan will turn 30lb buckets of crystallised buckets to runny overnight. Fan is crucial bit as it keeps the air circulating.
The honey probably only gets to 50C for the last couple of hours, meaning HMF levels are barely affected and most enzymes etc remain intact.

In comparison a lot of supermarket honey is briefly heated to 90C, run through a diatomaceous earth filter to remove all pollen (stops it crystallising so it can stand on shelves for months), and then cooled.

[max2]

Not a lot of joy here.
I have started to use my wax melter on "low" and keeping a close wach that the temperature does not exceed 40C.

Les is using  a fridge - a good move.

I don't know how much honey i will be harvesting next year with the likely event of varroa.

I generally have to store around 3 to 4 tonne.
It will be less next season as i plan to focus more on Comb Honey 9 need a bit of luck), queens and nuc's.

I have put the question of de-crystalizing honey to my beekeeping friends and everybody is struggling and a bit frustrated .
My small warming box ( only holds about 30 or so kg's) with a heatmat and a thermostate works very well but is soo slow.

I'm putting the word our for a large chest freezer. We use one for our homekills which 175cm long ( about 6 feet) - A freezer like this with a thermostaticly controlled heater and a small fan may well the solution?

What are people ( Michael?) in cold parts of the US, the world doing to keep the honey liquid? I know, I'm not the only small beekeeper with the problem.

[Ben Framed]

>Any other, cheap, gently heating ideas?


Max since you store so much honey:

Tim Durham has a video showing where he has solved the problem. He skips the small buckets as a initial storage means and stores in a 55 gallon drum instead. Around this drum he wraps round and round in a spiral, a simple heating cord. (The kind used to keep water pipes from freezing in the Winter months here). I can't remember how far apart he separates each coiled spiral round which covers the entire barrel from top to bottom..

According to him, and if I remember correctly, (its been a few years since I watched), his honey stays warm but nor hot or 'too warm to cause damage' to the natural good nutritional things which are found in honey.

So; here is another cheap, easy, convenient, gently heating idea that may help you store your honey, while solving your crystalized honey problem as well??....

Phillip

[Bill Murray]

Ahhh, heat tape. Brilliant Idea.