Warming up honey

[Acebird]

I have 5 medium boxes of honey in a stack setting on a SBB with a fan blowing at the bottom of the SBB and an electric oil heater in front of the fan.  How long should it take to get the honey to 85-90 degrees if it started at 30?  I think commercials use warming rooms around 110 degrees but they are not dealing with cold honey.  At first condensation forms on the frames which has to be evaporated while the honey is worming up.  But evaporation actually cools the honey.  I am wondering if this is going to take more than one day.

[BeeMaster2]

Ace,
You don't  say what the temperature is of the air going into the hive so it would be hard to determine. Are you doing this outside where the temperature is going up and down?
You say it is an oil burning heater. Is the exhaust from the heater, burnt fuel, going into the hives? If it is, I would be really concerned about fuel contamination of the honey.
If this is setup outside, I would move it inside and put a fan on it with a large opening on the bottom for good air flow.
A better idea would be to build the heater box that is in the arkives here and heat them up that way.
Jim

[Acebird]

Hard to verbalize Jim.  You missed "electric" oil heater.
I would say the air temp is 80 degrees but it is much warmer in that little room with a 1500W heater running constantly.  Fan blows air in at the bottom and I can feel it coming up through the top super.

http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv333/acebird1/2016%20Extraction/DSCF7700_zpsrsqf9gw4.jpg
http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv333/acebird1/2016%20Extraction/DSCF7699_zpsp0vjwffe.jpg

[divemaster1963]

if you can place a row of food warming heat lamps facing the hives about four feet away. place electric fan facing up over boxes hitting cieling and bouncing down. keep spacing around boxes for good circulation. in a closed room you can get the temp to 100-110 ten in less than hour if the room is 100-150 sq feet. uncle used a sealed metal shed that was 10x25 set up basicly this way for years to process honey it cold fall years. we had to wear shorts and tees in 20 degree weather to work the shed. we would rotate the boxes about ever 4 hours and pull boxes  it would take about a day to get them ready even with opening and closing the door to get a box of frames ready.

john

[BeeMaster2]

Brian,
You are right, that is because I did not know the name electric oil heater nor what it looked like.
Like Nohn says it should take you a day if you can close up that room.
Jim

[Acebird]

I didn't have time today to start the extraction.  Too many nursing home obligations.  So maybe tomorrow.
What my concern was little beads of what I thought was moisture but testing this morning it appears to be more honey in nature.  The air coming out of the stack feels more like room temperature were as before it was definitely cold.
I lost (not really) a little over a gallon of last years honey because it started to ferment.  I am going to use it for mead.  Last year the honey was in a freezer and even though it was stacked for a few days the bottom two boxes were still cold and covered with condensate.  Most likely this is the reason for the fermentation.  I want to make sure the frames are dry so the only worry I will have is if the honey is crystallized in the frames.  It didn't seem like there was a lot of golden rod and aster this year so maybe I will luck out.

[chux]

Acebird, I am glad you asked this question, so that I know I can look here in the future if this ever happens to me. But I do have a question...Why did you leave the honey in the supers? Was this taken off the hives late, did you run out of time to extract, or do you just run your operation by storing honey in the supers? Was this by mistake or by design. I'm curious.

When I pull honey, I work all day, and into the night, to extract it all and store it away in food-grade buckets. I then put the supers back on the bees for cleaning. I can warm and bottle honey all winter. It seems simpler than heating supers for extraction. Am I missing something? I'm always interested in hearing different techniques.

 

[Acebird]

Normally I pull supers late on purpose (oct/nov) then I like to freeze the boxes before I extract in the event there is any SHB or wax moth eggs.  It also kills off the few bees that may be in the boxes so there is none flying around the kitchen when I extract.  Due to purchasing meat I did not have the freezer space this year.  Due to dealing with in-law nursing home issues we did not have time to extract when I want to.  I actually ran out of honey this year and told people who buy my honey not to worry because I have 5 boxes in the back yard that needed to be extracted.  I didn't expect it to be this long.
The extraction went better than expected.  I got is all done in three hours.  I set up my uncapping knife to a foot switch so I could kick it on and off when I needed it.  It worked fantastic and I got no burnt honey on the knife.
Now the filtering is a problem because some of the honey crystallized in the comb.  The sugar crystals plug up the fine screen and it is taking forever.  I don't want to do this next year and hopefully we will not have the burden that we had this year to deal with.  Fingers crossed.

[texanbelchers]

Glad you got it done.  The burden is a trade off.  We had a very long year with my wife's parent's medical issues.  Now it is emotions and will resolution.  Neither is easy.

[rdy-b]

 your geting condensation because the honey is colder than the air around it--mosture is in the air--
try staking your suppers over a empty deep put alight bulb of atleast 60 watts--or more in the empty deep
put a lid on top of the stack--condensation always shows up on the coldest surface-so its the moister  in the air
in the room is finding its way to the cold honey and condensing--try to heat the honey and not the air around it---RDY-B

[Acebird]

Actually rdy-b, what I thought was moisture turned out to be little tiny beads of nectar or honey that spilled on the frames when I split the boxes.  The boxes were then stacked outside in the bee yard for over a month until I moved them in the house about 3 days ago.  The heater fan setup worked well.  It took a good solid day to bring the honey to room temp so I continued the process for another day to make sure.  I had no problems with the extraction.  In most cases the honey was expelled from the frames with a three minute run cycle so I ran the extractor for 4 minutes (used the stove timer).  The only improvement I need to make next year is in the screening of the cappings.  The paint screen was worthless.  The bucket liner was great though.
I think I am going to have to go with a coarse screen only for bottling because I don't want to heat the honey.  I am charging a high premium for raw honey and people are buying it so why change my goals.

[Acebird]

One improvement I accomplished this year is a foot switch to control the uncapping knife.

https://youtu.be/51IxLgvpKtM

[rdy-b]

you are very lucky --if i left suppers stored in a bee yard for even a day-all that would
be left to extract would be the mice--- are your bees ok-- im thinking maybe you
coverd them with plastic to keep the bees from robing out your high priced  gold for the
season--5 mediums --almost 3 buckets---proud of you ace-- ----RDY-B

[Acebird]

Thanks for the kind words rdy-b.
The chickens police the bee yard for mice.  Besides the mice would have to chew through solid boxes so I am not worried about mice.  Ants and other insects on warm days was my concern but this year we didn't get too many of them.  I am a lot less fussy then I used to be about scraping and saving every drop of honey and that resulted in a very quick extraction time for me.
I no sooner got the extraction done and a customer walks in the door wanting my first jar.  I had to go up to the attic and get a ball jar and fill it.  Didn't even have time to put a label on it.  That makes me 20 bucks ahead and it is not even 2017.  I am feeling the pressure for more hives... just can't do it.

[Michael Bush]

>One improvement I accomplished this year is a foot switch to control the uncapping knife.

Awesome.

[Mark Smith]

One improvement I accomplished this year is a foot switch to control the uncapping knife.

https://youtu.be/51IxLgvpKtM

Great idea. I'm going to try this.

[Colobee]

This week I ended up having about five mediums I wanted to extract. I set them on a shop table in a staggered stack ( getting them up off of the cool floor). I turned the heat up & had a fan running to help circulate the warmer air. The shop was ~92* when I finally started extracting. After 3 days, about half of the frames were still only reading ~85* with the IR thermometer. This was starting from a super temp of ~60*. It was obvious which frames were warmer - they came out of the extractor much lighter. I may re-rerun the heavy ones after they sit for another day or two - they will reach warm equilibrium much quicker once they are ~90-95% empty.
 
Tip: If a capped frame feels at all cool to the touch of a bare palm it probably won't spin out very well. I was thrilled to find that only about 10% showed any sign of granulation, although I had to clean the (SS) filters about 5X as much as with normal fall extraction.

[Acebird]

If the warm air is not forced up in between each frame it will take forever.  I learned that last year.  It has to be forced and it has to be from the bottom up.  As the heat from the warm air cools from transferring to the honey it tries to sink.  That is why the air has to be forced.  If you do not force the air up you must have a way for the cool air to come out the bottom of a stack as it sinks or the time goes from forever to eternity.  I wouldn't stagger the boxes.

My stack of five started at 34 degrees or colder.

[rdy-b]

yes indeed ace-this is why in my hot room i use a RADIANT heat source of HYDROSCOPIC design--
pex tubing ruining through the floor--hot water circulated through five gallon watter heater--creates
a even and forgiving heat source--thermostate temp controls are as important as not--if honey
loses to much moisture it becomes gummy and wont spin out correctly it is possible that a stack of honey
that is not heated in a radiant fashion would not be evenly heated--this would result in some boxes that
would granulate given a long enough time frame--even if all boxes where pulled at the same time--
--this also results in the seeding of your honey with fine crystals--which promote fast solidification or crystallising
of the honey--56 degres Fahrenheit is the sweet spot for granulation but time and temp may vary-- RDY-B