BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
_Marketing Honey._
**S25**. The quality of honey depends very little, if at all, upon the secretions of the bees; and hence, apple blossom, white clover, buckwheat, and other varieties of honey, have each their peculiar flavor, and color. The difference between the honey of one blossom, and that of another, is so great, that persons unacquainted with this diversity, when tasting honey different from that to which they are accustomed, imagine that either the one or the other is adulterated.
The most-prized and best-flavored honey produced in this country, is that from white clover blossoms (**701**). Basswood honey, if unmixed with any other grade, is too strong in taste, but a slight quantity of it in clover honey makes a delicious dish. Both these grades, being very white, sell more readily than any other, in the conb, excepting perhaps alfalfa honey and the white honey of the California sage.*
Footnote *: The honey of Hymettus, which has been so celebrated from the most ancient times, is of a fair golden color. The lightest-colored honey is by no means always the hest.
Smart-weed, or heartsese, honey,\(-\)which should properly be called knot-weed or Persicaria honey.\(-\)is of a pale yellow color and very fine in flaviv. Asters produce honey nearly as white as clover. Different grades of fall-honey, from Spanish needles, golden-rol, iron-weed, etc., are of a yellow color, and strong in taste. Buckwheat honey is dark; boneset honey and honey _low_ are the neSome kinds of honey are bitter, and others very unwhole-soone, being gathered from poisonous flowers. The noxious properties of honey gathered from poisonous flowers would seem to be mostly evaporated before it is sealed over by the bees. Heating, however, expels them still more effectually, for some persons cannot eat even the best, when raw, with impunity. Well ripened honey is more wholesome than that freshly gathered by the bees. When it is taken from the bees, it should be put where it will be safe from all intruders. The little red and the large black ant are extravagantly fond of it, and will not only carry off large quantities if within their reach, but many of them will drown in it, spoil its appearance, and render it unfit for use.
**S26**. _Comb honey_, in sections put up in cases of 12, 16, 24, or 40 sections, with glass on the side, sells most readily; and were it not for the greater cost of production, and the difficulty of safe transportation, this kind would be raised exclusively. One objection to it, by large producers, is that it cannot always be kept in good shape, from one year to another, owing to its tendency to "sweat."
Figure 22: Colorado Shipping cases. From the Colorado Honey Producers' Association. )
Sweating takes place in eomb-honey which has been sealed by the bees before it was fully ripened or evaporated (7.4.1), during a plentiful honey harvest. The changes of temperature in Spring and Summer cause a certain amount of fermentation in it, exactly as in the housekeeping' sealed preserves, when not sufficiently heated or sweetened. The result is a bursting of the eappings, by the pressure of the expanding honey, which runs out and over the comb and renders it unsalable. The same expansion sometimes takes place in
granulated extracted honey, accompanied by a slight fermentation.
**S27.** It is also held, by some leading Apiarists, that the cells, although sealed, are not moisture-proof, and that eomb-honey gathers water from the air, till it overfill's the cell and escapes through its pores. For this reason they keep their comb-honey in _a warm dry room. This is a good thing to do in every case_. Honey is hygrometric, and whenever exposed, gathers moisture rapidly, so that when kept in a damp place,a few unsealed or damaged cells very readily overflow, with watery honey, that daubs everything. Therefore, whether we believe that the sealed cells are air-tight or not (**262**), we should keep our honey in a dry plaee at all times.
To prevent the leaking honey in sections from running out of a case and daubing other boxes, a sheet of strong manila paper should be plaeed at the bottom of each case, with the edges folded up slightly, say half an inch.
"The cases for shipping and retailing honey, should be light, and glazed on one or both sides. Those holding but one tier are best. The sections should rest on narrow strips of wood 1% inch thick, tacked to the bottom of the case over a sheet of manila paper. This is to preserve the boxes from being daubed, in case the honey drips.
"These cases should be in readiness before the honey is ready to be taken off."--(Oliver Foster.)
This style of shipping ease has been lately sold by manufacturers under a new name, "the non-drip shipping case." They should be named the "Foster shipping case."
**S2S.** "Glazed sections"--one glass on each side of each section--have been largely sold in the East; but this mode of putting up honey, being very expensive, will only do for fancy trade. The producer can best tell what his trade requires.
Cartons containing one pound section and nicely labeled sell well and are less expensive.
When shipping eonb-honey to the large cities, Mr. Hutchinson, Editor of the _Bee-Keeper's Review,_ wraps each case separately in paper, to protect it against dirt, dust, or eoal-smoke, along the way. By this method his cases arrive on the market, as fresh and neat-looking on the outside, as when first put up.
As the careful handling of eonb-honey during shipment is very important, it is best to mark each case with a large label or a stencil, bearing the words:
HONEY IN GLASS. Handls with Care.
Very small lots ought never to be sent by rail, at least until we get better railroad regulations, concerning the handling of goods in transit, than we have at prescnt.
Comb-honey in large lots should be shipped in large crates, with handles at each end, each erate containing about one hundred pounds of honey, or about eight cases, of twenty-four sections each.
**S29.** The barrels that we use for extracted honey are oak barrels, which have contained alcohol. They are gummed inside, with some composition, to prevent the alcohol from soaking through the wood, and this gun, or glue, prevents the leakage of honey. Whisky barrels are often unfit to contain honey, for they are usually charred on the inside, and notes of charcoal fall into the honey and spoil its appearance. We keep our empty barrels in a dry place. As soon as filled, they are bunged and rolled into a cool and dry eellar, where they remain until the honey selling season, which begins in September, or October. Any dry room will do, when a dry eellar is not at hand, but a eellar has a more even temperature when cold weather comes.
If the barrels are damp, when the honey is put in, and are removed to a dry place afterwards, they will soon leak; for honey does not keep the wood from drying and shrinking. Honey barrels, then, should not be treated in the same way as wine or eider barrels; and swelling them, with steam, or hot water, 1:previous to filling them with honey, will not be of any benefit, unless they are kept damp afterwards. This is not to be thought of, for honey must be kept dry, on aecount of its hygrometric properties. It will absorb the moisture out of the staves of the barrel that contains it and will become thin and watery, and at the same time, the staves, in giving up their moisture, will shrink and the honey will leak out. Thus it is easy to see that none but the best dry barrels will do.
Figure 223.
grading HCNEF.
The Colorado grading, No. 1 and No. 2.
In this connection the reader will permit us to illustrate to him the hygrometric qualities of honey by narrating a little incident. We had received an order for a barrel of honey, to be in the liquid state. As this was midwinter, all our honey being granulated, a barrel was opened, the head taken out and the honey melted _au basin-marie_ (**S34**). It was immediately replaced in the barrel, while hot, and prepared for shipmen1. But it happened that this barrel had been kept, for some time after granulation of the honey, in a damp place, and the wood was somewhat damp. This hot honey absorbed the moisture from the staves during the night to such an extent that the next morning, the barrel was leaking from every joint. We have since that time allowed honey to cool off when treated in this way, before returning it to the barrel. But usually when honey is melted, it is at once put up into retail packages.
Clean1, barrels cannot be opened to remove the honey by taking out the head without damaging them, while good iron-bound oak barrels will last for years, and will never leak, if managed properly. To take the head out, it should be marked, with a chisel, so as to replace it afterwards exactly in the same position. A strong gimlet is screwed into the middle "if it, for a handle. After the hoops have been chased off, the head can be pulled out readily, and it is replaced in the same manner, when the barrel is empty.
If care and judgment were used in these matters there would be but little complaint on the part of dealers, about leaking honey shipped from the apiarist.
One of the most popular packages for putting up extracted honey and disposing of it in a wholesale manner is the sixty-pound can, either round or square. The square cans are boxed, one or two in a ease and are easily piled in wagons or cars, but the round can with a wooden jacket has been much recommended of late by a man of great experience in the production of extracted honey, Mr. N. E. France. The smaller packages for retail trade are discussed further (**S11**).
The honey, when put into large tanks to ripen, had better be changed to the retail package at the next handling. But the apiarist who extracts, as we do, at the out-apiaries, will find good barrels the handiest package to bring a crop of well ripened honey home immediately.
**S30**. In October, the honey of the July crop is all granulated, and that of the September crop is beginning to granulate.
There are many different opinions in regard to the causes of granulation. Some think that it is effected by the aection of light, but this is certainly a mistake, for our honey only sees the light when extracted, and is then kept in the dark until sold. We are more inclined to think that it is the aection of cold air which causes granulation; for sealed comboney generally remains liquid. The extracted honey, which we harvest, _always_granulates. We have handled liquid honey, however, several times, but we have _always_ found it to be un ripe; and have laid it down as a rule for ourselves, that good honey should be granulated after November. We speak of honey harvested in the Mississippi valley; such as clover, password, knot-weed, golden rod, buckwheat, Spanish-needle, etc.
**S31.** Of California honey, we can say nothing, having never handled it. But we have handled Louisiana honey, which, we were told, would not granulate before a year, and we had scarcely had it three weeks in our cold climate, before it began to granulate. The only ripe honey which did not granulate, was a lot of Spanish-needle honey, which had been extracted late in November. It remained liquid until sold, a month or two later, and we ascribed its not granulating to the late harvesting of it.
We have, however, seen a few instances of slowly ripened honey that did not granulate, although very thick and rich. These are exceptions. If honey is melted when granulated and allowed to evaporate a little, it will be very slow to granulate again.
**S32**. Every bee-keeper has noticed that, at times, honey hardens in very coarse and irregular granules, that look like lungs of sugar, and have no adherence with one another, with a small amount of liquid honey interposed between them; and that at other times, the candying is compact, and can be compared to the hardening of lard.
The first kind of granulation is always produced in honey harvested, like clover or basswood, during the warm months of the year; while the soft candying is prevalent in the honey extracted in the Fall. In France, coarsely granulated honey is held as less valuable than the fine grained honey, and there is a good reason for this preference, for the coarsely granulated honey cannot be kept as well as the fine grained. It is evidently less evenly ripened.
In this country also, coarsely granulated honey sells with less facility\(-\)especially because many ignorant persons imagine that it has been adulterated with sugar, and that the coarse grains are lumps of sugar.
In such honey, the liquid parts come to the surface, and absorbing moisture from the air, are very apt to become aeid by fermenting. But, even after granulation, it can easily be brought to a fine grain by melting it and exposing it to the cold of our Northern Winters. Basswood honey would even be benefited by this, as it would lose a little of its too strong flavor.
Basswood and clover honey are more apt to ferment than any other class of honey, even when thoroughly granulated, if they remain exposed to the heat of the following Summer, and it is advisable to keep these two kinds in a cool, dry place during the hot weather. A damp cellar would be objectionable, since honey readily absorbs moisture from the air.
**S33.** Those bee-keepers who will follow our methods, of extracting (**763**) after the honey crop, will have but little trouble with honey fermenting, even if they have to keep it throughi the following Summer. If any honey should ferment, however, let them not think that it is spoiled, unless it was really unripe and has turned sour. A slight amount of aleoholie ferment can be evaporated readily by melting the honey over water, when the ferment escapes in the shape of _foam_. As this fermentation is caused by the presence of unripe honey, some of our friends suceed in entirely preventing it by melting all their honey _immediately after granulation_. The melting evaporates all excess of moisture contained in it.
Mr. C. F. Muth, whose large experience in handling honey made him a high authority, ripened all his honey by keeping it in open vessels in a dry and ventilated room, for, a month or two after extraeting. Many noted Apiarists are now following that method.
**S34.**_Melting Honey._ Honey should never be placed directly over a fire to melt it. The least over-heating will evaporate its essential oils, and give it the burnt taste of dark molasses instead. It should be put in a tin or copper vessel, and this in another large vessel containing water. This heating _au basin-marie,_ as the French call it, is resorted to by eooks, confeetioners and others, whenever there is any danger of searching the substance heated.
In the case of honey, the water should not even be allowed to boil.
**S35.** The increase of honey production has been so great, in a few years, that the consumption has barely kept pace with it. But it will soon take its rank among necessities, like butter'or syrups; and change from a luxury to a staple.
**S36.** Our first crops of extracted honey, were sold readily at wholesale, and at good prices; for it was then that the wholesale dealers and manufaeturers were making the largest profits, by mixing the honey, which they bought from beekeepers, with cheap substances, like glucose, which kept the honey from granulating, and by putting it up in tumblers, with a small piece of comb honey in the center. This honey, or rather mixture of honey, was sold by them usually at lower prices than they had paid for the pure honey. But ready sales in this way did not last long; for, after a year or two, the markets were crowded with this drug.
Should our readers ever come across suspicious-looking honey, they will find the following a cheap recipe to recognize adulteration:
'Put in a small vial about one ounee of the honey to be tested, fill the vial with pure eistern water, shake thoroughly to dissolve the honey; then add to the mixture about a thimbleful of pure alcohol. If the honey is pure the solution will remain unchanged, but if adulterated with glucose, it will be turbid and whitish.
'This is the means used by the honey dealers of Paris, to detect adulterated honey.'--(Annales de la Societe d'Apiulture de l'Aube.)
**S37.** We have now United States laws concerning the adulteration of food and it is to be hoped that no honey will ever again be sold that contains a proportion of corn syrup or commercial glucose. This cheap syrup should be sold under its own name. It is of very inferior value when comparedto honey as it contains only about twenty-five to thirty per cent of saccharine matter.
False assertions have been made at different times concerning the possibility of manufacturing comb honey, filling it and sealing it over by machinery. It is hardly necessary to say that this is entirely impossible and if it ever beeame possible, it would be readily detected, as human hands could never make the variety of shapes that are achieved by the bees. No two combs are alike, when built by the bees, even if they have been built on comb foundation.
"So widespread was this falsehood, that in our journal of November 1, 1885, page 738, I offered $1,000 to anybody who would tell me where such spurious comb-honey was made. No one has ever given the information, neither has one ounce of manufactured comb-honey ever been forthcoming. It is a me-ehanical impossibility, and will, in my opinion, always remain so. * * I hardly need add, that the above slanderous report in regard to bogus comb-honey was very damaging to the bee-keeping industry. It probably obtained wider credenee because one Prof. Wiley, some years ago, started it by what he termed a'scientific pleasantry, ''--A. I. Root.
**S38.** The _granulation of honey_ was objected to by many consumers, at first, from the prejudiced idea that granulated honey had been mixed with sugar. It has ceased to be an objeetion, for, in our neighborhood, nearly all honey consumers now know that good ripe honey generally granulates in cold weather. But, now and then, a person is found who wants liquid honey, or comb honey, thinking that no other is pure.
We were told that the judges at an agricultural exposition refused to give a premium to a bee-keeper for his honey, because it was spoiled by granulating. These competent judges probably think that water is spoiled by freezing, for granulated honey if carefully melted (**S34**), is as good as before hardening.
**S39.** We have always found an easy sale for extracted honey among foreigners\(-\)especially German or French; as they have been used to granulated strained honey, which has been produced for centuries in almost all parts of Europe. Some of them are so well acquainted with it, that they prefer it to the finest comb-honey, saying that comb is not made to be eaten.
Onee, having received a favor from a French farmer, living a short distance from us, we selected a beautiful large comb of nicely sealed clover honey, while extracting, and sent it to tiis family after having carefully laid it on a dish. Much to our astonishment, we learnt, a few days after, that the good Freneh housewife had put our nice coub in a clean towel, carefully pressed the honey out, and melted the wax; and besides, that she was very much astonished at our having sent comb honey to her, when we had such nice extracted honey on hand. The reader may readily imagine that henceforth we never sent to them anything but extracted honey, much to their satisfaction and onrs.
Every bee-keeper who understands his business, should try to sell his honey when granulated, explaining to his customers that adulterated honey does not granulate, and that granulation is the best proof of purity. We have these words printed on all our labels.
**S40.** To improve the present prices of honey, which are in some cases lower than the prices of second class sweets, it is necessary that the masses should be induced to buy it. Thus far it is an article which few persons will buy regularly. Consumers will go to the grocery for tea, coffee, sugar, flour, meal, butter, etc., but very few make it a custom to buy honey \(-\)not that they dislike it, for "what is sweeter than honey?" but _because they are not used to it_.
All children, even in the heart of our manufacturing centers, have heard of "honey," but how many have never tasted it! Why? Fifty years ago honey was thirty cents per pound. Thirty years ago the very cheapest grades retailed higher than the best sugars. To-day, in many places, honey is still re tailed at from fifteen to twenty eents, while sixteen pounds of the best sugar are sold for a dollar. Yet the Apiarists crowd it to the markets at prices ranging as low as three eents. What is? Proper distribution. Instead of shipping our honey to the cities, whence it will be partly shipped back to our village retailers after having passed through the bands of commission men, and wholesale merehants, we must cultivate home consumption. We must show our neighbors, our farmers, our mehehanics, _at home_, that our progressive methods enable us to furnish to them the _sweetest of all sweets,_ at nearly as low a price as syrups. The occasional depression of the honey market is but temporary and its termination is on!y a question of time.
**S41.** It is important, in offering honey, whether to groceers or to consumers, to have it put up in neat and attractive shape. Combined honey in sections weighing only a bound sells best, because it is, and always will be, a fancy article.
But in putting up extracted honey, a one-pound package is now too small. We must encourage a consumption in which the expense of packing will not materially advance the cost, and we find that, owing to this advance of cost, the one or one and-a-quarter-pound package is less in demand than it was a few years ago.
**S42.** Tin is the cheapest package for honey, in small quantities. Our favorite sizes are two and-a-half-pound, five-pound, and ten-pound pails. The two and-a-half-pound pail is in great demand, and in the Winter of 1886-7,the bulk of our crop of that year, about 24,000 lbs., was sold in this package, at twenty-three cents per pair, or about nine cents per pound.
Some of our readers will ask why we do not put up our honey in these pails from the first, instead of putting it up in barrels. We never do so, because we do not know what proportion of each size will be required by the trade; because honey in small cans occupies too much room, and is not so easily moved out of the way; and especially because we keep honey from the best seasons for the years of poorer crop, and it keeps best in barrels. We have kept honey in pails for two years or more, but the pail often rusts on the outside, and becomes unsalable. The objections above given are very weighty, in extensive production, when tens of thousands of pounds have to be cared for, but the small producer may, if he chooses, put up his honey, at once, in retail packages.
**S43.** To stop the accidental leakage of honey in pails\(-\) for, owing to its weight, it will leak through seams that are water-tight\(-\)we simply rub over the leaky spot a little tall?w-wax, prepared by melting beeswax with tallow or lard, in varied quantities.
A friction-top pair is now manufactured by the Tin Trust which is sufficiently honey-tight to fulfill every purpose. These pails are in many instances taking the place of the pair originated by us and which is for that reason called the "Dadant pair." All kinds of packages are sold by dealers, and papers or paper sacks are recommended for granulated honey. There is no doubt that these paper sacks are the very cheapest package for retailing honey to the masses, but the amount put up in these must be limited to the actual winter consumption, owing to their probable leakage when warm weather comes. The sacks are generally coated with paraffine.
A great deal of honey is sold in glass jars, but our objection to them is that granulated honey does not look well in them, and they are more costly than tin. Honey, in tin, can be put up gross weight and although no'one objects to the weight of the pair, this weight helps to pay for its cost. Those who use glass as a honey package, melt the honey before bottling it.