What's new on the farm:
It's so hot in Saskatoon!
Is summer smacking you right in the face with its intense heat? It is for us. With +30 Celsius temps (and +40C with the humidex!), there have been some long, hot days of working out in the bee yards.
This week we will start going back to the yards to harvest the honey boxes that the hives have now filled up with honey.
At this time of year when the nectar flow is on, the bees can fill up a box every 7-10 days. Each box will contain about 40-50 pounds of honey!
Needless to say, by the end of summer you can get pretty strong lifting a few hundred boxes of honey a week.
When the bees first put the honey into the honeycombs, it actually looks like a watery syrup.
This is because the honey still has a lot of moisture in it from the nectar, and it needs to be dried out. It can contain 70-80% water at this point.
When there is too much water in the honey, it can cause the sugar molecules to ferment and turn the honey sour.
The honeybees have figured out a clever way to deal with this. To get rid of the excess water, he worker bees will fan their wings in front of the honey to evaporate the moisture from the syrup.
Over time, it will start to thicken, and eventually it will get to a point where the moisture is low enough, around 18%, that the honey will be ready to store for a long time!
When it's time to store the honey, the bees cover the cells of the honeycomb with a layer of beeswax to seal it shut and protect it from contamination. This is called "capping" the honey (like putting a cap on a jar!).
At a later time when they want to eat the honey, they remove the beeswax and eat it up!
Moisture content if highly influenced by the environment and climate.
Different flower nectars will have higher or lower amounts of moisture in the honey, and even the amount of rain that you get in a season can affect the moisture content as well.
For instance, during years of drought, our honey has gotten a low as 15% moisture, and the texture can be extremely thick.
In wetter years, the rain can make the honey really high in moisture, so you have to be careful about harvesting it properly.
Sometimes other processors with more industrial set ups will harvest the honey early, while it's still not fully dried out, and then artificially dry it out with fans and dehumidifiers in their facility.
Or others don't dry it out at all and the honey eventually ferments and turns sour!
When we first started out, we didn't know better and learned this the hard way. That year we ended up with a portion of our honey crop that fermented a few months later! 🫣
The honey was still safe to use for baking and cooking but it wasn't that tasty on its own or for your morning coffee.
Another downside when you take it out too early, even if you dry it out, the bees may not have completed the process of properly regurgitating, digesting, and evaporating the honey so that it also contains the full amount of enzymes and vitamins that get passed into it to make it truly honey.
So now for us, it's really important that we wait until the honeybees have capped the majority of the honey in the box before we harvest it.
The honeybees know what they're doing and we don't want to mess with it!
Isn't that incredible that they have figured out how to cure and preserve their honey? I am just amazed every year at the beautiful work that the bees have put into this magical food.
Next week I'll dive more into our extracting process, so tune in then if you're interested in how your honey is made!
