Honey Never Spoils

 

We had some honeycomb in plastic bins left over from last year.  For a while the kids had just been eating it with spoons, but the bins had been put away and forgotten for a bit, and then the honey hardened.  A nice upside to honey is that it never spoils.  Sits forgotten in a bin for a year?  So what?  It never spoils.  It may crystallize but that is not a bad thing.

Patti made a double boiler from large stock pots and crushed the comb into the inner pot, breaking it apart as best she could.

 

She slowly brought the honey inside the pot up to about 130 degrees and held it there until all of the comb had  broken apart and floated to the top.

Then she skimmed the waxy debris off of the top and we filtered it through two layers of cheesecloth tied over another stock pot.

Once that was done, the wax which still had some honey in it was placed in the cheesecloth as well and left to sit overnight.

This morning I bottled it up.  Ended up with just short of another gallon of bottled honey.

The final result is interesting.  I had not been able to compare the relative color and taste between the two locations, being the darker honey made by bees in our neighborhood, and the lighter honey made by our bees after they were moved to the Ness farm.  The darker honey is smoother, without the sharp citrus overtones.  The lighter honey is more sugary with a sharper taste.

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5 Responses to Honey Never Spoils

  1. Patti says:

    Tom, you are wrong about the age of the forgotten honey. It was not from last year, it was from the year before last. It was two years old!

  2. Dee says:

    Interesting! Good job of recovery, waste not, want not! Can you do anything with the wax left over? Make candles? Candles that smell like honey would be nice, maybe they would smell like burnt sugar. Or melt it down for parafin for jam jars – although I don’t know if anyone still does jam that way these days. Where did people get their wax in the old days?

    • Tom says:

      patti wont let me post on the wax bit. she is working on it and has a whole bunch of photos and a project she is working on.

    • Salih says:

      We estimate that the hive of bees would be 1,200 bees. We found this awesnr by counting 1/4 of the picture. We found that there were 70 bees in 1/4 of the picture. We added 70+70+70+70=280 bees. Then we rounded 280 to 300 bees. Next we knew that 300 was just 1/4 of the entire bee hive. So we multiplied 300 4=1,200 bees in the bee hive. We are so glad that we did not have to count 1,200 bees! Thank goodness we know how to estimate!Mrs. Martel’s 2nd & 3rd graders