🌡️ Warming Honey

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Background:

Bottling cold or even worse crystalizing honey is not much fun. Messy and time-consuming bottles that come out cloudy make the head beekeeper a little angry, and angry gals are never a good thing when dealing with bees. Our solution was to purchase a bottling tank. We had our eye on a Maxant Tank (MODEL 600-2 200# or 16 gallons) for a while now and decided to bite the $1,350 bullet plus another $100 for the No-Drip Valve. This is a fine piece of equipment that will last us a lifetime, and solve our crystallizing honey problem by being able to bottle on demand. 

The trouble is these are very difficult to come by these days. We tried a couple of dealers hoping that Rossmann Apiaries would help cut back on shipping costs without any luck. We even called up to Maxant and they are having all kinds of supply chain issues. The bottom line is they can’t get the components needed to build the tanks and are sporting a 3 month lead time., (Thanks COVID). By no means a knock against the fine folks at Maxant. They are top-notch and make incredible equipment. I had a chance to meet Jake and get a tour of their facility back in 2019, and the operation is nothing short of impressive. 

None of this is helping us put honey in bottles. 

Necessity is the Mother of Invention:

Inventing a honey warming cabinet is not the case here, but we needed to get something in place and quickly as we have some orders to fill. We went to the University of youtube and quickly found some excellent guides on building a honey warming cabinet. The Beekeeper’s Workshop has some great videos (on building all kinds of equipment). It was impressive to see just how much his honey had crystalized, (the whole 5-gallon bucket was solid). 5 Acer Homestead put together a similar cabinet, https://youtu.be/GEodLkJqv7c, and here is a link using what appears to be supers, https://youtu.be/EiXV8woQbdU. We opted to cobb something together using our own 8-frame boxes. The actual material list and directions are here and pasted below, but we wanted to list some caveats we encountered:

  • A 5-gallon bucket with a screw-on lid JUST fits in the width of an 8-Frame box. When we say JUST fits it may need some encouragement. Always problematic when trying to load a 60lb bucket from the top. It’s much easier to remove the upper boxes and put the bucket on the queen excluder than replace the supers. Not sure why it took so long for us to figure that out.
  • Bottle a full warmed bucket and then put your bottles back in to keep them warm. This is another thing that we should have thought of.
  • We started off with a 100W light bulb, but couldn't get and maintain the temperature high enough. We opted for the 150WReptile Heat Lamps that do the trick nicely.
  • I’m sure a dimmer switch would work, but the digital temperature controller makes life a lot easier.
  • Seems like setting the temperature for 110°F (figuring we are holding the honey temperature between 100°F and 105°F) does the trick for decrystallization, and the honey pours great. At this temperature, we shouldn't be harming any “good stuff” that the honey provides. 

Honey Warmer Cabinet

Anatomy:

Total - $109

If you’ve been at this for a bit you’ll probably end up with loads of scrap pieces and extra equipment. If not, the costs of the extra equipment will have to be factored in.

 Assembly:

  1. Cut and staple the plywood to the bottom deep.

  2. Put the casters on.

  3.  Wire the light fixture with the old extension cord, fishing out hole drilled in the plywood.

  4. Install the 2x4 supports cut to length to just touch the queen excluder so it doesn’t sag when placing a 5 gallon on top.

  5. Install heat lamp.

  6. Staple flashing on top of supports to protect the lamp.

  7. Fasten fan to QE using the bolts provided, plug into the light fixture.

  8. Stack the boxes and “sleeve” stack using the insulation board and duct tape.

  9. Plug the light fixture into the temperature controller and you’re ready.

Total Time - 2.5 Hours
Location: Colfax, NC, USA

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