Crystal Clear

It's probably well over two months since I looked at this honey. It's been sitting in a cardboard box in the shed while we had the trauma of killing colonies, the excitement of the sole survivor doing so well and producing a big yield and still working away busily into the autumn. This honey was extracted from one of the doomed colonies the day before they were dispatched. I expected it to be unripe (high moisture content), and was surprised and pleased to be proved wrong. I suppose there has been a slight sense of 'dead man's shoes' about it too, but that is in the past and it is now interesting in its own right

It is very unusual for us to produce honey like this from the orchard apiary. Every year there - 13 or 14 of them - our bees have had access to oilseed rape, and the spring honey has consequently set very quickly into a matrix of fine crystals, the whole jar crystalising together into a uniform paste. This colony must have found some other source of nectar. It remains half-liquid, and is crystalising very slowly from the bottom up. I haven't tried it yet, but you can see that the crystals will be large and coarse on the tongue - a very different experience. I'm looking forward to breakfast 

I remember being taught that two of the common volcanic rocks, bassalt and granite, have the same origin (volcanic magma) and so very similar chemistry. The difference between them is that bassalt has cooled quickly on the surface into a matrix of crystals so tiny that our eyes cannot distinguish them - we simply see a rather boring grey mass. Granite has cooled much more slowly, below the surface and under pressure, which gives, time for each mineral crystal to grow much larger, and become easily visible, producing a decorative array of colours and textures - quartz and feldspar, mica and horneblende. I think honey obeys similar rules - slow crystalisation producing large, visible crystals

Note that my black hands are perfectly clean. It's just the anual consequence of apple pressing with an iron press, leaving indelible stains that take days to wear off. Chemistry that I still do not understand