We get this question a lot: Why does some of your honey crystallize more quickly than other honey, or more slowly than the last batch I bought from you? Why is this lot more liquid than the one I just picked up at the store?
It’s a very good question. We are constantly buying and harvesting honey throughout the year, and each load we bottle comes from different plants. The bloom-cycle of the flowers bees forage on changes all the time (most flowers bloom for two weeks or less), so the honey we bottle is essentially coming from different plants during the course of a year.
This means that each lot of honey will act differently than the last. The flower nectar bees make honey from is sugar-water. Each flower source has a different fructose to glucose ratio in its nectar, and depending on that ratio, the honey that is made from it will crystallize more or less quickly.
If the nectar has a low glucose ratio, the honey made from it will crystallize slowly. If it has a high glucose ratio, the honey can crystallize within days of harvesting- in fact, it can crystallize while still in the comb!
Some people think that raw honey means the honey needs to be crystallized, but this is not true. Raw honey simply means that it has been extracted from the hive and then bottled- no filtering through fine-mesh filters to remove pollen, and no pasteurization of the honey (see the Raw Honey Amendment from the state of Utah). all our honey is warmed to a maximum temperature of 110 degrees F, if at all, and contains all the living enzymes and pollen grains the bees imparted to it. It is a natural product, and as such, we invite you to enjoy the subtle, delightful differences of each honey harvest.