a hive you don’t have to get into?
Just looked kind of interesting.
For Joe
by CJ | Feb 15, 2015 | Journal | 9 comments
9 Comments
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Not sure they know what they’re doing. They certainly aren’t giving details yet. And the open jars of honey? They’d be full of bees and other insects in the real world.
My father had an electric uncapping knife, a gadget to wire the comb, and a home-made extractor. I still have about three pints of his Texas wildflower honey: he’s been dead more than 20 years, and had stopped keeping bees about five years before that, when he couldn’t lift the supers any more. The smell of warm honey, the sound of happy bees: those I enjoy.
My Dad always enjoyed the process of harvesting honey.
What a lovely essence of memory.
P J, if that honey is in mason jars, it’s probably still good. They’ve opened containers in ancient tombs in Egypt and found the honey was still good. The secret is the lack of water in honey. As long as it retains a lower percentage than 18%, bacteria and yeast spores can’t flourish. The lack of moisture dehydrates the bacteria, and the yeast just goes dormant. Which is why if you allow it to “breathe”, it’ll eventually ferment – mead, maybe, but without knowing the strain of yeast, I wouldn’t trust it.
The idea of a flowhive looks good, but it certainly has its problems that I don’t see addressed in the trailer. As P J said, bees, even (and maybe especially) the bees in that hive would try to recover the honey any way they could, ending up crawling down into the jars, getting trapped and drowning. In my area of the country, an open jar of honey is an invitation to yellow jackets and ants. And, if the health department ever saw one of those, they’d probably forbid you to sell any honey out of the jars, or out of those tubes. Even with a slick surface, there will be residual honey inside the tubes, ants and other insects will try to crawl up in there, and effectively making the honey unsellable.
There is nothing like opening a hive in late spring as the bees are collecting nectar (or as we call it – a nectar flow). The warm smell of the wax, the honey, and the bees, are a combination that you just don’t duplicate. And can’t, as every hive smells differently. Now, go to that same hive in July, and you’ll wonder what the heck happened to your bees…they’re attacking! Because in the spring, there was lots of nectar and the bees weren’t overly concerned about “sharing” with you, but now in July, the flowers have dried up and there’s no nectar coming in, and the bees aren’t in such a sharing mood.
It was in a five-gallon bucket while in Texas (food-safe; we were using the honey), but I moved it into a gallon HDPE (food-safe) jug. Biggest problem is that it’s semi-solid, but that’s fixable. (I have some eucalyptus honey that’s more of a problem – I have to add water to do anything with it, it’s so solid. Doesn’t look like it, until you tilt the jar and realize nothing moves.)
If you can gently heat the honey to about 120 degrees, it should melt….the problem with it is that it will still re-crystallize, and possibly more quickly.
If the jug is airtight, then no moisture should get into the honey.
If I have to use water to get the honey to move, the honey goes down the drain. Maybe it’s wasteful, but as far as it goes for me, if water gets into the honey, it’s ruined, anyway. You can’t accurately measure it out for an equivalent of sugar, etc. Most of the time, it’s just old honey that has been in the bottling bucket and can’t be removed any other way. The bottling bucket isn’t hermetically sealed, and it’s only used to get the honey from the extractor to the bottles.
BTW, if you like things like cinnamon rolls, using honey in the dough instead of granulated sugar makes for an outstandingly light and fluffy dough that puffs up very well when it bakes. I guess the yeast like the fructose in the honey better than having to break down the sucrose into simpler sugar.
I have no bees right now, probably won’t have any unless I get a call for a swarm pick up. Even then, there’s no guarantee, because swarms might or might not be viable. It depends on when they swarm. If it’s early June, they’re not viable, or else I’d end having to feed them every day. While feeding isn’t that expensive, the gas to drive 15 miles to the hive and then 15 miles home, every day, would be prohibitive.
Tried that – it didn’t work. I added about two teaspoons of water, which helped, and then it recrystallized. I’ve washed the jar lid and wiped the rim just to be able to get the lid off (glass jar, metal lid).
This particular eucalyptus honey is a bit difficult. I have some other varieties that are easier to handle. (Raspberry is behaving. So is the avocado honey.)
I once spent an afternoon watching the hive in the backyard, because my father thought it was going to swarm. It didn’t, but I have seen swarms a couple of times. The rest of the hives he had then – this was in the Bay Area – were across town and up the ridge a bit, about ten miles away. (The one in the back yard was rehived from some pallets where he worked that were going to be moved. That was back when you could buy hives from Sears. Fun to assemble, but wire brads don’t go through masonite at all well.)
hmmm, I replied, but it’s apparently been “eaten” by the same entity that removes one sock from a random pair in the clothes dryer……a parallel universe of entries to WWAS that never made it, or are they at Port Eternity?
Interesting!