BBKA Forum

British Beekeepers Association Official Forum 

  • To Jar Or Not to Jar that is the Question

  • General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #8108  by Steve 1972
 03 Jul 2020, 11:14
This is another first for me so unsure what to do..every year my first lot of extracted honey sets like concrete (OSR) being the reason..i have eleven buckets here extracted between 25th May to the 1st June.. four of which have not shown any signs of setting where as the other seven buckets have set..the OSR and everything else flowered a month earlier than previous years which was a really dry i am thinking with it being so dry the OSR produced little nectar so a lot of the bees where using the other forage..Phacilia/Lime/Sycamore/Wild Cherry and Blackthorn that i know of..

Would you wise Guru forum members risk jarring it or let it stand for another month..
 #8110  by Patrick
 03 Jul 2020, 14:36
Hmm, for anyone to respond implies considerIng themselves a guru. Maybe a gnu in my case.

I only jar up what is going to be sold or given away imminently. I personally prefer jarring up clear honey as clear, but nowadays as cloudy honey is often described as Raw I am not sure gin clear has as much of a retail cachet as it holds on the show bench. Things change - it wasn’t so long ago Manuka honey was virtually unsaleable.

It is an odd one that buckets do vary so much bearing in mind they are blended in the extractor, but I have noticed they can stratify due to varying densitIes so the extractor drains differentially from full to empty. The smaller the bucket potentially the more marked the difference. I use 30kg buckets so the variation is not so marked as 30lb buckets. My arms are also longer since I switched.
 #8111  by AndrewLD
 03 Jul 2020, 16:05
I have a load of jars in my garage that was bottled last autumn and is taking forever to set and some has stratified. I have 30lbs buckets from the same extraction, some is runny, some is set...... I have decided never to bottle that which I am not going to sell fairly quickly.
My only consolation is that much of the exotic sounding honey I brought back from the USA, France and Italy is also sitting there stratified.
I am not a guru or a gnu and only occasionally speak as a "world leading expert" but in our family that means I am about to say something that has absolutely no foundation in fact or science but is purely an off-the-cuff thought that could change in 30 seconds or less.
 #8112  by NigelP
 03 Jul 2020, 17:15
I think the gnu consensus is only bottle what you are going to sell in the near future. It's easier to liquify a bucket of set honey rather than liquify 40-50 jars that have set etc.
Like yours Steve my early spring honey (April) is just setting, even the stuff from near the OSR. Weird year.
 #8113  by Steve 1972
 03 Jul 2020, 17:35
Cheers Gnu's :D ..i will sit on it for now but not sure for how long as it is flying of the shelf and i only advertised it certainly has been a weird year up to now Nigel but as you previously mentioned get used to it.. i think i will just have to go with the flow regarding these little for melting jars of set the tea shirt for that which i hope to never repeat.. :lol:
 #8114  by AndrewLD
 03 Jul 2020, 17:36
I noticed that my Carniolan derivatives were bringing in a wider variety of pollen than my Buckfast derivatives that were gorging on the oilseed rape.
Or was it the other way round :?

P.S. I only put that last sentence to avoid another Buckfast advert.
 #8116  by Chrisbarlow
 03 Jul 2020, 22:17
I only jar when im ready to sell my it. As previously said.