Ugli Honey

Jeff and I harvested three frames of honey from the original Lenox Pointe over the weekend.  I crushed and strained the total of 8 frames that we took on Sunday.  Some of the honey was very strange.

Here's what the cappings looked like.  Instead of individual cells being capped, the bees indulged in this stained glass approach.  The honey was a dark orange.



The frame below is what a whole frame looked like - it's all disorganized and the cappings on all three frames had this modern art look.



Inside the cells some of the honey was crystallized!  The grains of the crystals were large and rough against the roof of my mouth.   The honey tasted a little like apricot with a sharp finish at the last minute.  I've never tasted anything like it.  The moisture level on the refractometer was right at 18.6.



Here's a view of the cut side of one of the combs.  See the thickened crystal?

These bees are all overwintered hives so we didn't feed them this year at all.  I wondered if this were honey that was the result of the bees visiting a hummingbird feeder, but with three full frames (and we left the other five in the super because they weren't capped yet), that would be a lot of sugar syrup.

What nectar could these bees have gathered that would crystallize in the comb?  And we've had very hot weather in Atlanta - about a week of days with temperatures over 100 in the last couple of weeks.

Any ideas?

Color Combo Honey

Note: (Google has been having some problems with uploading images. These images are small but at least they uploaded. If you click on the image, you can see the photo much bigger).

Last year most of the supers I harvested had honey of a consistent color. An early super would have light colored honey on all 10 frames. A super filled in July would have very dark rich-tasting honey, possibly from sumac and catalpa.

I took off some frames from the hives over the weekend and discovered that the frames from Melissa had two colors of honey in the same frame - both light and dark. In the picture below, I've outlined the honey on the outside of the frame that is very dark and the honey in the center is quite light.

In this picture if you look at the uncrushed comb, you can see the very dark honey on the edges and at the top of the picture and the top of the uncrushed comb, you can see the very light honey

Even when I crushed the comb, you can still see the pool of light honey up against the pool of dark honey. I'm not sure if this is atypical and will let you know when I hear from the forum question I will post.


Post Script: One of the posters on Beesource suggested that this represents a switch in nectar source. The picture of the full comb is on a frame sitting upside down. The light honey was stored first (at the top and center of the frame). We are now moving into the season where I get dark, rich, delicious (to me) honey. So the honey more recently loaded into this frame was probably from the dark honey sources (sumac, catalpa).

Meeting a Melissa Pollinologist

I haven't ever met a melissa pollinologist until the meeting of the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association this past week. Our speaker was Dr. Paul Arnold and he refers to himself as such. Paul Arnold is one of the founders of the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute which I attended in May and has taught in the biology department of Young Harris College for 19 years.

He said that he is one of the few people in the country who analyzes honey to determine what pollen contributed to the honey. More people are melissa pollinologists in Europe and Australia. I was one of the nine or so people in the club who drew the straw that allowed us to bring out honey to him to take back to Young Harris and analyze.

Dr. Arnold told us that many people wonder why would one want to analyze honey for the pollen. There were four reasons:

• To determine the nectar source for marketing purposes
• You can't say for sure your honey is sourwood, for example, without this analysis
  
• To determine undesirable nectar sources
• This year there was an abundance of mountain laurel in the N Georgia mountains and because of the late hard freeze, the bees had little else from which to choose. As a result they made a ton of mountain laurel honey with is poisonous and smells like brake fluid.
  
• To verify a pollen contract
• If the person who hired the beekeeper wants to know if the bees he hired actually visited his almonds or blueberries
  
• To determine the source of a pesticide kill
• If bees are dead in droves around the hive, analyzing the honey may give you the source of the kill

There are many drawbacks (he had slide after slide about this) to doing pollen analysis. Among the drawbacks are:

• Equipment cost - microscope, centrifuge, slides, etc.
• Many pollens look alike so it's hard to come to an answer
• There are few pollen guides on the subject

Dr. Arnold makes his own reference slides when he finally gets down to an identification

He had a series of slides which were a lot of fun to see showing the notable characteristics of various pollens:

• Size: tupelo, for example is very large, dandelion is very small
• Shape: pollen is sometimes triangular, 4-lobed, football shaped, round, winged, etc.
• Wall apertures (openings)
• Wall ornamentation (spikes, knobs, pits)

What he does in the process is:

He mixes 50% honey and 50% hot water. He mixes this well and then centrifuges it at 1500 RPMs for 5 minutes. He then pours off the liquid and there is a pollen pellet at the bottom. He pipettes this out onto slides and looks at it under a low light microscope.

I left my dark honey with him. He had said the less filtered the better, so I put some from a cut comb box of the dark into a jar and left it for him. I've been mystified by this honey because it is very dark - less dark this year - but still very dark. The bees made this honey while I was gone over the week of July 4th. I know this because the hive had no honey in any super before I left and this super was full when I came back.

Dr. Arnold did say that the dark honey in Georgia late in the season is often made from smooth sumac or catalpa. It will likely be weeks before I know the answer about my particular honey because he spends about 30 minutes processing each individual sample. He was very kind to do this for our club, and all he gets for the effort is our appreciation and a taste of each honey sample!

So I was very glad he shed a little light on the dark late season honey before he ended his interesting talk at the bee club.

I feel very lucky that he was so generous to our club - taking home members' honey samples to analyze.

Honey differences!

Amazing that there are major differences in the honey I bottled today and the honey from last week. The super this week was on the hive less time than the first week. The honey this week is lighter and tastes very different from the honey from last week.

Last week the honey seemed to be flavored by the tulip poplar. It is dark honey with a smooth flavor and has a taste that is softer than this week's honey. This week the honey tastes much lighter and ends with a tart almost lemony note. I love it - and I loved the honey last week.

The last picture is a comparison of the first jar of honey last week with a comparable jar bottled today.

The super this week was one of those where the wax wasn't long enough for the frame and the bees had not drawn it all the way down to the bottom of the frame, so there was less honey and less beautiful comb to cut.

Nonetheless, I bottled 8 pints of cut comb honey, 42 tiny honey bottles to give my Emory grad students when they turn in their final exams on Wednesday, and 10 half pints. The bucket is still outside in the heat and will yield several more bottles before we are all said and done.

I can't get over the fact that the two honeys taste so different. I imagine the tulip poplar is a clear cut honey taste, but where did the tart taste come from in the jars I bottled today?