Squeeze Your Honey
Squeeze Your Honey
Our Apiaries are carefully situated for the health of the honeybees, and for our ability to manage and maintain their hive. The honeybees collect nectar from a wide variety of flowers under the best conditions possible — abundant water and no pesticides used in their 4 to 5 mile foraging range. There are two harvests per season; the Spring Harvest yielding a light clear honey and the Fall Harvest yielding a dark opaque complex flavored variety.
In order to keep the honeybees safe from pathogens, we don’t use any chemicals or medicines in our hives, but we do monitor them diligently to make sure their life cycle favors only those colonies which exhibit resistance to diseases.
The extraction process for removing the honey from honeycomb uses centrifugal force and the liquid honey often contains tiny fragments of beeswax which rise to the surface when poured into jars. Beeswax is not harmful to ingest.
Honey contains antimicrobial material which keeps it from degrading over time. There’s no “best by” date on this package because the honey will taste just as delicious and suffer no deterioration over time. If the honey crystallizes, just put the tube into warm water (no hotter than 120 degrees Fahrenheit) for an hour, and it will liquify again. Some honey harvests are prone to crystallizing, and some are not.
If the honey crystallizes, just put the tube into warm water for an hour, and it will liquify again.
What is crystallization?
Crystallization of honey is completely natural and does not change the quality or flavor of the honey. This change of states is what happens to raw, unfiltered and unheated honey. The way grocery store honey is prevented from crystalizing is by heating and filtering in ways that remove “good” stuff from honey — namely particles of pollen, and it degrades enzymes. Heating too much also vaporizes volatile flavor components of raw honey.
What makes honey prone to crystallization?
Honey is a supersaturated solution of sugars. It contains more than 70% sugars and less than 20% water. In other words, the water found in your honey contains more sugar than it can naturally hold. This overabundance of sugar makes honey unstable, and nature doesn’t like instability and will always try to reach equilibrium. Your honey’s efforts to reach an equalized state result in crystals beginning to form in the honey, causing it to thicken and eventually become solid. Honey from our apiary may crystallize, depending on the types of flowers the bees have foraged in. This changes from season to season, and from year to year.
Four conditions affect how fast the crystals form and how large they will be.
Composition: The two major sugars found in honey are glucose and fructose, and the percentage of each will determine how quickly a honey will crystallize. Because glucose is less soluble than fructose, honeys that are higher in glucose will crystallize more rapidly. Conversely, honeys higher in the more water soluble fructose will crystallize more slowly.
Temperature: Honey held at very high temperatures and very low temperatures will crystallize more slowly, or not at all. One of the reasons most grocery store honeys will not crystallize is because they have been pasteurized, which requires high heat. The most ideal temperature to induce crystallization is 57F. The further you get away from that number on either side, the slower a honey will crystallize.
Catalysis: The honey has to have catalysts, or nuclei, for the sugar crystals to form around. This can be tiny, microscopic bits of pollen, beeswax, or propolis.
Filtration: Another reason the grocery store honeys will not crystallize is because they have been heavily filtered. This is done to prevent crystallization altogether, but the issue is that now the honey is no longer raw and is missing a lot of the inherent health benefits that come with eating raw honey. Basically, you’re now just left with the sugars.