I noticed today that the honey that I harvested out of the Flow Hive is still liquid after 3.5 months whereas all the honey I spun has crystallized to some degree. My guess is the centrifuge and sieves cause enough mechanical stress on the honey to start the crystallization in the same way that scraping a glass rod on the bottom of a beaker of a supersaturated solution will cause it to instantly start to crystallize.
The extra floral note is still there.
And yes, I made sure the flows were fully capped before harvesting.
8 Likes
That’s interesting.
Keep us updated. Some pic’s would be good too 
Maybe the plastic adds some type of preservative?
Also it only takes one crystal to set the whole lot off. In the extractor you are probably incorporating the air and the honey cools quickly and some evaporation occurs which will supersaturate the honey also causing crystallisation; sucrose sugar molecules will come out of the solution and collect on any seed crystals; time and temperature does the rest.
Plastic is not a food preservative. Next time you stick leftovers in a plastic container into the fridge watch and see if the same stuff, in a glass or metal container, decays on a significantly different timeline.
And the crystallization issues is not a preservation problem. Crystallized honey is not ‘spoiled.’
3 Likes
That’s interesting.
Did you extract from the flow at the same time as you spun? Was it the same honey?
I have a jar of my very first honey, nearly ten years old that is still liquid and clear.
This year the honey from one hive crystallised in three weeks and from another, not yet.
Any foreign body as well, a piece of wax, bit of bee, and pollen.
Honey rich in pollen usually crystallises quicker than that with little
1 Like
When I store food in plastic the smell of the food lingers in the plastic so I wondered if the reverse was happening and some of the plastic was lingering in the honey and somehow slowed crystallization. Maybe that’s why the taste is different as well due to the plastic.
Hi Harry,
I’ve also noticed that the flow frame honey was much slower to crystallise compared to the spun honey. My theory is that the spun honey contained more bubbles and small bits of wax etc. that galvanised the crystallisation process earlier. I do note that I did not extract with both methods at the same time. I know this is an old topic but given so many more of us have extracted now (519 days later) I was wondering if anyone else had noticed similar results?
1 Like