We have had the best compliments on our delicious honey! Of course, the most asked for is what beekeepers call “runny honey,” or you would call it simply “honey.” It’s not creamed, it has no chunks of comb in it, but honey can be raw or heated. All honey will crystallize unless it has been cooked. Some starts crystallizing right in the hive, as we saw in 2024. Our summer harvest was cloudy, but not with pollen that was not filtered our. Oh, no; the pollen is there but doesn’t cloud the honey very much, we realized the honey was already crystallizing. Even some frames had opaque cells of crystallized honey. This is unusual but not unheard of.
The reason why some honeys crystallize faster than others is because not all honeys are made from the same source. We suspect that this summer our girls were foraging at nearby farms that may have planted canola, which has been known to cause the honey to crystallize fast. We have honey on our shelf from our 2021 fall crop which is still absolutely clear! And yet the honey harvested almost three years later has become clouded with tiny crystals even before it was bottled.
You will have the choice of purchasing this naturally crystallized honey, or honey which has been gently heated without cooking it. This does not destroy the enzymes and the goodness that makes honey one of the very best foods for health. We never boil honey or heat it at high temperatures. The bad news is that it will crystallize again. Use up your honey quickly, or enjoy the extra thickness of crystallized honey, or simply heat it slowly by putting it in a pan of hot water, but NOT on anything but a “warm” setting. You can leave a jar of honey in a hot car to de-crystallize, we are told, although we haven’t tried it. Other people have had success wrapping it with a heating pad such as what one would use to start plants.
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