I get jars of 'hard honey', toss in nuke for 30 seconds let rest say 2-3 minutes , nuke again

never ever had a problem with 'longevity' as it gets used up PDQ !!

If you're not going to use all that honey fast, pour into smaller jars. it getting hard is OK...

can't go bad...

gotta wonder what 'UNnatural' honey is ???

Natural honey or raw honey is honey that has not been heated, and/or is not cut with corn syrup or something else.  It's pure honey that has been taking out of hives,  I believe the state of MI classifies it as not being above 115F degrees(don't quote me but thats close)  The reason for not over heating it is that you will kill all the good pollen and natural antibiotics that are in honey.  If you over heat it or nuke it doesn't matter you just loose some of the beneficials.  Some people that have allergies use honey raised locally (within 50 miles) for aid with allergies, any good doctor worth his salt will tell you raw local honey helps allergies as much as any drugs.  The reason why a lot of honey is heated(pasteurized) is that it kills a enzyme that causes it to crystallize easily.  If I was to wager a bet KFC honey isn't raw.  Raw honey demands a higher price and if you go to store it's always right on the label that its raw.

If your honey is crystallized and you want to liquefy it and keep the good in it just make sure not to heat it above 110degrees takes longer to liquefy but will still be considered raw.

As far as shelf life of honey, well the Egyptians put it in King Tuts tomb and when it was taken out they sampled it and it was safe to consume, so unless you think you might keep it for say 10,000 years it should be good to go.

I believe the Egyptians were the first to produce domestic honey and a close second was the bear.

Here ya go,  always check the use by date on honey.

FREEDGUY wrote: Thanks Kansas, this is exactly the product I was given; basically straight out of the hive  !! In fact, the guy told me I "might" want to run it through cheese cloth ?? Thanks for the info !

Yep that's raw honey, probably only ran through a sump/sieve so there might be little specs of wax or a loose leg or something.  I never worried to much about it thru a sieve or coarse screen was good enough for me.  If you ever get honey that is 100% made off of sweet clover the dang stuff will make your teeth hurt it's so sweet and looks clear as water dripping off your finger.  I tell you what's the bomb is honey on the comb thats been in the fridge is beyond good.  Just bite you off a piece of comb and roll it around in your mouth munching on it till you spit out a nice white piece of wax.  Damn now I'm wishing I had some honey in the house.

The last 2 years a guy has been bring a few 100 hives for summer and fall. The honey he has given crystalizes, always just nuke it so it comes out of the plastic bottle. 

There is a summer weed here that smells like turpentine, old timer called it turpentine weed. Blooms good all summer with no rain and hot so bees do good on it. So bee keepers renamed it blue cruel. That honey stinks so it is used a winter food for the bees.  

Ouch  !!

that is why you don't put honey in a plastic container if it is going to set long enough to crystallize. Beekepers store honey in 5 gal. plastic buckets, but have a cabinet to gently liquify the honey in, some use a light bulb as the heat source.   

Didn't know that Lars,  I have acid reflux and up till the hives got stolen never even tried that, still have a couple hundred gallons of honey in storage so might get some out and give it a try.  I'm allergic to PPI blockers so Pepcid is about all I can use.

Nella we had a ss 1000 gal milk tank that instead of cooling we would run hot water through the lines and as it would liquefy it would run out into 5 gallon buckets.  Beekeepers also use hot rooms, where they just keep the room temperature at 110, can store honey in them and also bring in supers for extracting that way things flow better in the extractor.  Barkman down in Hillsboro uses what your talking about for 5 gallon buckets, as they bring them in they just set them upside down in the cabinets before they final strain the honey and bottle it.  Guessing a lot of people in the midwest that bought raw honey have gotten Barkman honey even if the label said something else.  They even id and track honey they buy, sample it for miticides, etc.  I think on there website you can track a bottle of their honey that you bought.

Here's the biggest Beekeeper in the country:  https://www.adeehoneyfarms.com

We we're never interested too much in honey, although you're going to have it or your not going to have living bees.  We were more interested in pollination,  there isn't enough beehives in NA for the almonds in CA, so they pay a pretty penny if they want almonds(takes 2 hives per acre so a pallet of 4 hives does 2 acreas or a sami load of bees does 200 acres).  Worked pretty good right up till the hives didn't make it back to KS and the guy taking care of them in CO fell of the face of the earth.

Won't matter, bees are too clean and when they get the moisture content of the nectar down to 17-18% they stick a wax cap on the cell.  Honey is then locked up tight and clean and good to go for say 10,000 years.

John,  bees are the second most organized insect colony next to the termite.  They know whats up and that hive other than the entrance will be sealed tight with propolis(sp),  some people sell it for those the want a natural antibiotic/antimicrobial.  Let me tell you its some pasty stick shi$.  It won't stop a bear though.

I will say the best smelling honey I have ever smelled was when I was out in Central Valley and decided to go to Sequoia Nation Park to chop some firewood one day.  Anyways the park was closed because of snow and they seemed upset when I told them I would drive in to see if it was safe for Californians to travel the roads, so I just turned around and had time to waste so going back down the valley I stopped at a fruit stand that was pay buy honor system(ya I know suprised me too) so I decided to take a picture to send home, figured nobody would believe this.  Well after a couple minutes picking through the stolen fruit the lady that ran the stand came out of her house.  We started visiting about bees and she had a couple hives, so she got me a bottle of citrus honey to take,  I wouldn't take it but it smelled like citrus strongly and had a not as strong citrus taste but you could tell where it came from for sure.

I should add in the park rangers defense it could be my fault that we started off on the wrong foot when I asked her how many Sequoia trees I could get in the trunk,  I was driving a Toyota Camry.

When is the last time that your honey tasted like GRAVEL  ??

Please elaborate , I'm curious

I believe Walker meant organic honey.

HD6GTOM wrote: Freedguy. The guy must be a fairly new beekeeper. We been doing this over 25 years. Put a large pot of water on your stove, bring it to almost boiling, shut off the heat, set your bottle of honey it, leave it for a few minutes, take it out, shake it up, you have a pretty large jar, you may have to do it several times to get it to liquify. Do not store it in the fridge, if you do it will christalise quicker. Most folks put their honey on the table or store it in a cabinet above the stove. Buy your honey from a local beekeeper. A lot of the honey in the stores originates in China. They are still using chemicals in China that were banned in the US clear back in the 1960's. The bottles are filled here in the Us, but a lot of the stuff has been dried to powder, put on a ship from China and when it gets here water or corn syrup is added to it. It will need to be warmer than 65°. You can warm it up to 105° without destroying the good properties of the honey.

"They are still using chemicals in China that were banned in the US clear back in the 1960's."

Yes but they banned taktic and I've heard of people boot legging it back from south of the border.  I believe it's legal again under a new name and higher price, of course when you ban the safest miticide ever made for more dangerous ones that don't work and colony collapse hits, then they will bring back the old safe stuff.

I was so green when I started with bees when I heard taktic, I thought they wanted me to go get the saddle out of the shed and check hives on horse back.  Boy I'm sure glad I didn't need to do that me and horses have a rough history.

When we had the farm, we had a local beekeeper that set hives every year. He was very good at putting them out of the our way. It was a win-win. We got pollinators and he got honey.

When he picked them up in the fall, he always brought us some honey.

The only incident we ever had was when I got a little too close to the hives with the discbine and bumped them. I had about hundreds of angry bees in the cab of the 7000 in seconds!

Neighbors of mine are one of the larger beekeeping operations in my area.  Sandra Thiessen  has come up with some very innovative ways of using honey.  They sell there products world wide.  Yes, I get my honey from them!

Here is a link to their site"

https://bearyberryhoney.com/" rel="nofollow - https://bearyberryhoney.com/

Honey moisture causes honey to ferment and sugar content and types of sugar cause honey to crystallize.  If the honey is too wet that stinks if it's crystallized it's too sweet.

Not trying to start a argument here but bee's will cap honey when it's 17-18% moisture or less depending on where the hive is at and the humidity,  honey that is too wet will ferment. The types and amount of sugar in honey will make it crystalize, some faster then others but all raw honey will crystalize.  The temperature it's stored at is the biggest factor.   Uncapped honey may or may not need dried before it is bottled or extracted, if it is capped it will be dry or the bees wouldn't cap it.  Honey must be over 20% moisture to ferment and if you have uncapped honey that your going to extract it's best to use a refracter to check the moisture content so you don't ruin all your honey when it ferments.

I haven't had comb honey for years !

X 2,    exactley correct

 If you get a chance try honey made in Greece, from the plant thyme. Like no other honey I had ever tasted!

Regards,

 Chris

Despite bugsquirt bringing up an old thread, it was fun to read since I musta missed it or forgot that I read it.

  Brother-in-law had close to 800 hives and we had 60.  We had pails of honey after the market went to heck because of all the imports that gov. opened up... which killed those that were relying on the honey to pay their debts.  and also when the unsavory were adulterating honey with corn syrup and selling their so called honey as honey. 

 What people do to make a buck ...

  20 years ago I planted a couple fields of buckwheat and flax, a bee keeper heard that and wanted to set out some hives.  He brought in 16 hives and set them along the west side of a wood line and checked the a couple times and finally took the hives. Said it was a disappointment, thought he would have had more honey out of there than what he got. I was disappointed too, he brought a jar of honey when he came to pick up the bees, but it wasn't from the buckwheat and flax. 

Lars, I found when I had reflux going on that I took a couple Fennel seeds and chewed on them and couple times like that, it was gone.

 Niece was heart-burning one day when she showed up to pick up her grandma and I told here to take a couple of them and then sifted some more into a little sandwich bag just in case the first few didn't work.  She made the comment that those few weren't going to work and I told her to just humor her dear old uncle and she did.  Later when she came back and dropped off her grandma, I asked her how her indigestion was now and she said that it was gone before she got to the end of the driveway. She just couldn't believe how fast those few little fennel seeds worked.  LOL

OK all you gurus on honey..........

I had a "UGH" plastic container of honey that had never been in a fridge and it had turned a darker brown and got hard.  It was golden colored when I purchased it.  I didn't know if I should eat it or toss it.  What do ya think?  It was labeled raw.  I had forgot it in the back of the cupboard.....

Please don't eat it ! Send it up to me !!

jes kiddin... it's safe to eat.

sigh, I remember scraping honey with a knife to get it onto my toast when I was,well, ok, 60 years younger......