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General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #13045  by Alfred
 14 Aug 2022, 18:50
I ended up with 17.5 I think it helped putting them through the dryer.
Last year was a major battle and after muchos taffeta still only managed 18.
Is this down to the contraption I cobbled together or is it more the drought?
What readings have everyone else recorded?
 #13047  by Alfred
 15 Aug 2022, 06:58
You're not much further south Jo - did you have a lot uncapped?
 #13048  by JoJo36
 15 Aug 2022, 07:10
I would say yes more than normal, although I gave it the shake test!!
It tastes very nice, floral and 'bleddie ansome' to coin a local phrase!! :)
 #13049  by NigelP
 15 Aug 2022, 09:22
Up North it's been very variable. Spring honey was 16% which was like treacle. After that anything from 17-18.5% all which are fine in my books.
Not sure what the heather will be but some will need drying. It's legal to sell at 23% water but I like it less than that as this can easily ferment. But the way the bees are bringing it in at the moment it's likely to be on the high side, they are filling supers but not capping them as the flow and weather have conspired for them to be too busy collecting nectar to do the mundane jobs. Hopefully a b it of rain this week will keep them in and give them something to do.
 #13050  by AdamD
 15 Aug 2022, 10:15
I haven't checked the sugar content of capped honey recently.
However, I have some supers that I have taken off recently which does have some uncapped honey in the frames so I'll check when I spin it out - usually at the end of the season it's below 20% water content but the bees just haven't gotten around to capping it yet.
If I have some that's been extracted at, say 21%, I'll mix it with some that's lower in order to get 20% maximum.
I do have a drying tank which I have used for wet OSR honey once extracted, however I didn't need it this year and managed to get pretty much all of it out before it set.
Looks like a good year for honey - I think I will run out of buckets. A nice problem to have.
 #13064  by MickBBKA
 17 Aug 2022, 02:12
Just extracted one of my last supers and its about 3/4 capped. Capped honey on this particular super is 19%. It wouldn't take much unripe honey to push it over 20% and I prefer it below 19% for storage. But after I extracted the whole super it remained at 19% so the uncapped honey was low enough although not as low as I like. Strange that the spring honey was such a low water content of 15/17 % after a real crap cold spring and the late summer honey which I never usually get is 18/19 % after an unusually mostly dry and warm June / July.
 #13066  by Alfred
 17 Aug 2022, 18:37
So the dry summer didn't have much effect at the refractometer, can we conclude?
 #13068  by JoJo36
 18 Aug 2022, 04:37
I would have thought the opposite with the spring honey being of higher moisture content than the summer honey with the hot sunny weather??!!
Hmmmm, these bees are a mystery..............:)
 #13069  by NigelP
 18 Aug 2022, 08:34
To my mind the lower moisture readings occur when the bees get extended periods confined into the hive, and so have more time on their hands to do more drying/capping. Like this spring which was generally poor weather wise, with good days for foraging interspaced with days confined to hive.
When you get extended periods of good weather in summer the bees are foraging every day during daylight hours, nights are also shorter. So less time to dry and hence higher water content, as per this extended summer. I'm seeing this on the heather at the moment, continuous foraging and very little honey capped but supers filling well. I'm expecting to have to do a lot of drying when I get it back.
A few years ago when we had a good spring and the bees working OSR were at it continually, great yield but the capped honey was reading 22% moisture.....not enough time to process properly.