Page:Bee-Culture Hopkins 2nd ed revised Dec 1907.pdf/14



My former experience as a honey-merchant brought me into contact with all sorts and conditions of beekeepers, and all sorts and conditions of honey—in its qualities of ripeness and unripeness. I then realised the need there was that beekeepers should have some simple but reliable method of testing honey for its ripeness before putting it up for the market. It was frequently very difficult to decide whether honey was ripe or not while it was in liquid form; and to-day the same difficulty obtains, demanding every effort to remove it.

It is beyond the accomplishment of the average beekeeper to determine the exact amount of moisture a given sample of honey contains, neither is it necessary, as we shall be able to arrive in time at the knowledge we require by very simple means—that is, through the density or specific gravity of the article. A very great number of tests must be carried out before anything approaching a reliable standard of the specific gravity for ripe honey of different varieties can be established.

Previous to carrying out, recently, a series of tests of a number of samples of honey (which I shall explain directly) I consulted several works in hope of getting some assistance from them, but was disappointed. “The British Bee Journal” for December, 1885, contained the only item on this matter in all my bee literature. The then editor, in reply to a correspondent, gave figures from different works representing the specific gravity of honey, ranging from 1.261 to 1.450, and then suggested taking the mean of these figures—viz., 1.355—“as a conventional standard for ripe honey,” admitting, at the same time, that “clover honey in a dry season is found to be 1.370.” This was a very haphazard way of deciding so important a question. Thorpe’s work, already referred to, gives, on page 287, a range from 1.439 to 1.448 as the specific gravity of honey; another equally well-known work gives from 1.425 to 1.429 for “virgin honey”—whatever that may be—and from 1.415 to 1.422 for “honey from old bees”(?); and the “Encyclopedia Britannica” gives 1.410. The foregoing figures, instead of affording any assistance, are, on the contrary, rather misleading with regard to the actual density of ripe honey.

Some little time since I purchased from grocers in the ordinary way twenty tins of different varieties and grades of honey, and tested them very carefully for their specific gravity with a Twaddel’s and a Fletcher’s hydrometer. Before testing, the condition of each sample was noted, in order to compare the specific gravity with its appearance. Eleven