Crystallised honey

[Beekeepingchef]

Good morning flowhive friends,could somebody please advise,if I have crystallised honey in my superframes ,what should I do to rectify the situation?

[ClintSC9]

Check out this post…

Possible solution to removing crystalised honey in flow frames

Hi all, I’ve had issues with crystalised honey in the flow frames reducing harvests from potentially 3kg per frame down to one or less, not to mention problems with the flow key and repeat attempts to harvest the same frames . I haven’t had a lot of success with heating up the frames reliably either. My mentor tried something recently with conventional frames with great results, so I thought I’d apply the same logic to flow frames. He placed his conventional manly frames…

[JeffH]

Hi Nigel, welcome back.

I guess a physical inspection can confirm what degree of crystallization, if any has occurred. Another possibility can be Leptospermum honey, which sets like jelly in the cells.

I found that if the honey is partly crystallized, a second key can be used to support the first key. For a client I used both keys and fixed them in the open position. In doing so, the frames slowly opened, allowing the uncrystallized honey to slowly flow out.

[Martha]

What season are you in? Did the honey super stay on the hive over the winter? I would let the bees eat it or deal with it or rob it out of the super.

I’m wondering if certain plants/trees have a high sugar content nectar as here in very early spring some of our trees have some nectar that chrystalizes and I only know this because I had a very early harvest one year and all of it chrystalized in the bottle.

Maybe it boils down to the source of nectar the bees are bringing into the hive. Maybe the bees are capping sugar water? Some people feed the hummingbirds in containers the bees can get to. This is a mystery and I think more info is needed like time of year in your part of the world and how the super was stored etc.