What is wrong with my honey

[Grieth]

I bottled some honey recently, and the other day I noticed these white lines in the honey in the jars.    While it looks like hairs it is not hairs.  The honey still seems to taste fine. I took some photos as best I could. 

Does anyone know what this is and what causes it. :?




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[tefer2]

Looks like hair to me! Did you filter it at all?

[tillie]

The honey doesn't seem at all clear so I also wonder if you filtered it or how you filtered it.  That definitely looks like fibers of some kind - I use a three filter bucket system that you can buy from all the bee supply places.  If you filtered through cloth, those may be fibers from the cloth.

Bottling honey can be a personal thing in which you just put the honey in the bottle for yourself and the product tastes good, but the presentation isn't important. 

If you are selling it or giving it away, bottling honey needs to result in a product that the consumer of your honey would want to buy.  That is the reason for the strict presentation rules in honey contests - to teach you how to present honey as a selling product.  In that instance, honey needs to be filtered so that it is clear and bottles need to be handled with gloves, literally, and cleaned well inside and out with no flaws in the glass.

Sounds like you like the taste just fine and are OK with it, but if that were my honey, I'd want to run it through a non-fibrous filter system.

Linda T in Atlanta

[Vance G]

I hope you don't have a lot of it that way because you need to filter that out whatever it is.   It is going to be a mess but if you put all the affected jars in the dishwasher sealed tightly and run them thru a cycle, it will warm up the honey to go thru a filter.  I would try a clean new leg of a pantyhose.  Run a jar thru it into a clean jar and see what it looks like.   You will have to wash all those jars before refilling or youwon't get rid of the fiber that will adhere to the glass.  THis is a troublesome lesson learned!  Just treat it that way and press on.  The honey is not ruined, it just has fiber from whatever you filtered it with in it.  Whatever that was don't use it again.  Good luck.

[Lone]

I would try a clean new leg of a pantyhose.

I'm glad you specified "new".  I only thought to ask my father a couple of years ago if the cloth nappies (diapers) he used to filter the honey when I was young had been used, and he said, "Yes, they were yours.  But they were clean."

Lone

[beyondthesidewalks]

Yummy. :)

[rdy-b]

  If that was a filtering issue then what you see would eventually float up to the top
 I wonder if its not a defect in your jars-hard to tell by the pics-but my guses is its the glassware its self--RDY-B

[tillie]

I don't know - the honey is so cloudy that it looks as if it were filtered through something with big holes that might also allow threads to go through as well - especially since the threads are described as white.  If my jars were that cloudy before pouring the honey into them, I'd pick a different type of jar.  Canning jars are cheap and clear.

Linda T in Atlanta

[tefer2]

Do you have a beard ? Still looks like it's in the honey, not the glass.

[Kathyp]

hate to say it, but it looks like a mold.  i don't know if honey grows mold....i didn't think it did.  thought it just fermented if the moisture content was to high. 

was there a lot of pollen in it?

[divemaster1963]

I believe I have seen this before. My uncle had a batch that looked like this. He found that one of his men had added uncapped honey to a batch. the honey was not ready an the higher water content and processing allowed wter and air molecules to mix with the honey causing stranding.

hope this helps.

john

I forgot to say try warm water bath for the jars and then let set for a couple days. that may settle it to the top or the bottom of the jar.

[Grieth]

Thanks for the tips.
It is definitely not fibers, the straining was through stainless sieve only,  into tank under extractor.   The strands  you see are not solid like a fiber  or hair (and I do still have my beard).

Not every cell of the frames was fully capped,  but thought 80% was,  at least.

Will try a heat bath and report back.

Thanks for the comments.

Grieth