Setting and Bottling

With the year's honey crop extracted and sat in buckets it wasn't quite time to kick back and relax. The honey bottling and half the crop needed turning into set honey too. The easiest way to make set honey is to add existing set honey to your liquid honey and mix it. I'd saved a few jars of last year's set honey for that very purpose.

Mixing set and liquid honey

After warming the set honey a little I added four jars to a bucket of liquid honey and stirred it with a honey creamer -a huge corkscrew type thing that you attach to a drill. It takes a while for the honey to mix properly. In the photo above the set honey's just been added and you can see it's very different in colour from the liquid honey that was already in the bucket. basically you keep stirring till it's all  the same colour. Once mixed it goes into jars and I gave it a week in the fridge to finish setting. Doesn't need to be in a fridge really just somewhere not warm. The first batch of set honey was then used to turn a few more buckets of liquid honey into set honey.

As last year I decided to do two sizes of honey jar, 454g jars which is the traditional 1lb honey jar and some smaller 250g jars. The 1lb jars came from Freeman & Harding just like every other year. The 250g jars I ordered via eBay from Compak South Ltd who were selling 96 jars for £26.48 which is a pretty good deal. Unfortunately when they arrived two jars were smashed in the box and two had faults in the glass rendering them unusable and Compak South didn't respond to emails. Eventually eBay offered a refund if I returned the jars but by then I'd used most of them so it wasn't feasible to. As a result I left them some negative feedback and a review on Trust Pilot. Looking at their feedback I can see I'm not the only person to have had a similar experience with them. Shame really as I've bought from them previously.

I'm no glazing expert but one of these doesn't look quite right to me.

Bottling honey is a simple process. Just pop a scales under the honey gate, sit a jar on it, zero the scales and pour out the honey till you hit the desired weight then close the gate and remove the jar. Inevitable this leads to a slight over filling of each jar but better to be over than under. Here's a quick video of some freshly mixed set honey going into a 250g jar, whilst I listen to The Rumjacks.

..and that's how it goes into the jar.

I've fitted honey gates to most of my small honey buckets but hadn't got round to fitting them on the larger buckets yet so I had to decant some from the buckets without gates into those that had. This led to some spillage as I'd actually left pen the gate on the bucket I was pouring it into. Ooops. Luckily I had my buckets standing in some great big plastic Garland Trays which meant clear up wasn't a problem, on the downside they're not food grade plastic so the spilt honey couldn't be used.

There were over 200 jars in total. Like last year I printed my own labels on a Brother QL-570 thermal label printer. I got it on sale a year or two ago and never looked back. Being a thermal printer there's no ink involved and it has a built in cutter so you can make labels any size from a continuous roll. I'd been thinking of making a jig to put jars in to line the labels up but in the end I just used a spare frame top bar to line them up doing a few at a time. I pulled out about 80KG of honey from the hives. After spillage and minus a few jars there's about 73KG left to sell on.

2016 Honey Crop