Hi Bruce, ideally the honey should be 100% or close to 100% capped. You just need to make sure that if you harvest from a frame that isn’t 100% that the rest is on the verge of being capped. What I do is a simple test with my hive tool on the honey that isn’t capped to see how thick it is. If it’s real runny, I’ll put the frame back, if it’s nice & stiff & it can’t be shaken out of the frame, I’ll take the frame. However, even in that case the frame would still have to be around 75% capped before I do the hive tool test.
There’s no contamination as such. It’s just that you want your honey to be “ripe” it you want to store it for any length of time. If you harvest one frame of ripe honey & one frame of unripe honey & mix it together, the blended honey could have too high a water content & therefore shouldn’t be stored for any length of time.
If you discover your honey is unripe, it is still perfect to consume & enjoy or share, it’s just that like I said before, you wouldn’t want to store it long or it could ferment. The freezer would be the ideal place to store it. Especially in smaller containers.
What Jeff calls “ripeness” refers to the moisture content of the honey (in case anyone doesn’t already know this). Honey with a moisture content greater than 18% can begin to ferment, particularly when stored at warmer temperatures. Bees thus mostly concentrate the nectar to a moisture content of below 20% before capping, so this serves as a rough estimate of moisture content. In Germany we have to be more specific (using a refractometer), as honey offered for sale cannot have a moisture content greater than 18%.
(What this has to do with the original topic, I don’t know.)
-Kevin (presently in Bucharest, where the bees are flying today)
Hi Keven, congrats on your bees flying today, I hope you have many more. My bees are on strike, they’re not going back to work until I can guarantee them shorter working flowers & more honey. Did I just go off topic? sorry:)
Kevin, they’re all a very friendly lot on this forum, they can tolerate a little bit of going off the original question. We’re here because we love bees & love talking about them. Beats sitting in front of the tv any day. cheers
