honey with a bad smell

[danno]

This might be a question for the midwest and possibly Michigan only.  My wife sells honey out of her business and a couple of weeks ago she ran low.  I went to one of my strongest colonies and pulled 4 capped frames.  These were going to be cut comb so I crush and strained them.   This is honey collected in the past month.   Well although its tastes great, it smells bad like urine.  I have talked to a few locals and none had seen this before. Now I have them all worrying that they might run into this at extraction time.   One thing that was differant this year was the Autumn Olive, similar to Russian Olive flow.  This was huge this spring.   The county reeked of this for a couple of weeks.  This is a evasive that was introduced by the dept of Ag many years ago to improve wildlife habitat.  It grow 8 to 10 ft high, very bushy and is covered with flowers then edible berries.  Everything eats the berries that have a large seed in the middle.  They are then planted elsewhere by these animals so any unmaintained open land is covered with these bushes.  One of the local old timers told me to let it set and check it in a month.  Anyone encounter anything like this?   I know our goldenrod smells but I leave it for winter feed and its still along way away

[skflyfish]

Danno,

Last year's honey had an odd smell to it also, though I wouldn't call it urine. It had a fermented smell to it, though it tasted fine. Larry Hasselman, who extracted it for me, thought the taste was excellent. I thought the 5 gallons was going to turn into mead at any time.

After a month or two the smell subsided and I was left with some pretty tasty honey. Though I have a lot of Autumn Olive in the area also, I figured the honey was mostly basswood, star thistle and wild marjoram. I pulled it before the goldenrod.

Like every thing this year, the Autumn Olive bloom was huge, but I did not see many of my bees on it. Maybe your busting hive needed it, but the girls found it to be much less desirable than wild cherries and black locust, which were in bloom around the same time.

I think letting it set is good advise.

Jay

[danno]

Jay
Larry Hasselman was one of the people that i talked to last night and he was the one that said it might improve with age.   The timing of things were different here this year.  Cherry came early and Locust was a couple of weeks late.  I should also mention this smelly honey is darker than normal

[skflyfish]

As I think about it, last years honey was darker than before. Now it is very light. Hmmmmmm.

I wonder if it is really Autumn Olive. It seems like Autumn Olive is pretty consistent from year to year, unlike Black Locust. It is fragrant, but so is Black Locust and Basswood and they both make good honey. Seems like if it was Autumn Olive you would experience it every year.

I got a walk away split from Jim Hilton and some of the honey in it was quite dark, but that was probably from Florida, and so was some of my early honey that got robbed out. I just don't know where it could be coming from. Maybe willow? I have a few willow trees that the bees hit early in the season and they seem to collect nectar from them.

I would sit it out. (Like you can do anything else)  :)

[skflyfish]

Here is something about willow.

http://books.google.com/books?id=JpllAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA155&ots=t4semmO-1L&dq=american%20honey%20plants%20marjoram&pg=PA282

It says; 'a dark amber and bitter honey'.

A thought.

[danno]

I really think its the autumn olive.  I had never pulled frames this early so I think the Autumn olive in the past has gotten mixed in. 

[skflyfish]

I Google'd Autumn Olive Honey and everything I found (this thread has been indexed already by Google!) was that it was light in color and mild.

http://mtnstatehoney.com/page10.php

Maybe you can email the Mountain State Honey folks and see if it is dark and smelly at first.

Jay