[marant]

If one leaves all the honey in the hive until the end of the season can you tell by working up through the honey supers that one came from one type of bloom and another from a different one? It seems to me that as the bees work through the season the honey would have a different flavor from one location in the hive to another.

If this is the case do you sample the different supers or frames and process them separately? For one with a lot of hives this would probably not be practical, but if I only have one or two it might be worth it from a learning point of view.

What do you think?

 

[squarepeg]

around here the bees are usually working many different kinds of blooms at once. it is possible to see differences in how light or dark the honey is that is made at different parts of the season, and sometimes you can see different honeys stored on an individual frame. i've not tried to separate them, but rather tried to mix them up as much as possible to get more complexity in the flavor.

 

[Vance G]

What you are talking about can be done. When I was a new beekeeper with a dozen colonies, I would hold frames up to the light to separate different flows. I was anal enough to just uncap the half of the frame that was the color and variety I was going for extract the frame with the rest of its color. In this way I ended up with really light colored white alfalfa honey and an almost pure clover honey which had bloomed earlier. Young people with more time than sense can indeed do such things. Two different kinds of honey on my table at the farmers market helped sell honey as the customer got to prove how smart they were by selecting which they liked best.

 

[Ravenseye]

It's possible but mine are typically a mix all the time. Every so often I'll pull a super and find some light frames of honey and some dark frames in the same box. Clearly from different flows but I don't bother to sort it out. They all go in the extractor at once. It is kind of interesting to see it though!

 

[Michael Bush]

I just sort by color and extract starting with light and working my way to dark.

 

[wmsuber]

It is interesting to see different bands of colors on a single frame, and I eventually run them all together when extracting. Still being new to beekeeping, I find it to be a good opportunity to personally learn more about my local blooms and what the honey actually taste like. I can't resist getting a spoon full of different honeys when I am scratching frames, on the job training!