516, HONEY HANDLING. 



ripe; and have laid it down as a rule for ourselves, that good 

 honey should be granulated after November. "We speak of 

 honey harvested in the Mississippi valley; such as clover, bass- 

 wood, knot-weed, golden rod, buckwheat, Spanish-needle, etc. 



831. Of California honey, we can say nothing, having 

 never handled it. -But we have handled Louisiana honey, 

 which, we were told, would not granulate before a year, and 

 we had scarcely had it three weeks in our cold climate, before 

 it began to granulate. The only ripe hoiiey which did not 

 granulate, was a lot of Spanish-needle honey, which had been 

 extracted late in November. It reSiained liquid until sold, a 

 month or two later, and we ascribed its not granulating to the 

 late harvesting ■ of it. 



We have, however, seen a few instances of slowly ripened 

 honey that did not granulate, although very thick and rich. 

 These are exceptions. If honey is melted when granulated 

 and allowed to evaporate a little, it will be very slow to granu- 

 late again. 



833. Every bee-keeper has noticed that, at times, honey 

 hardens in very coarse and irregular granules, that look like 

 lumps of sugar, and have no adherence with one another, 

 with a small amount of liquid honey interposed between 

 them; and that at other times, the candying is compact, and 

 can be compared to the hardening of lard. 



The first kind of granulation is always produced in honey 

 harvested, like clover or basswood, during the warm months of 

 the year ; while the soft candying js prevalent in the honey ex- 

 tracted in the Fall. In France, coarsely granulated honey 

 is held as less valuable than the fine grained honey, and 

 there is a good reason for this preference, for the coarsely 

 granulated honey cannot be kept as well as the fine grained. 

 It is evidently less evenly ripened. 



In this country also, coarsely granulated honey sells with 

 less facility— especially because many ignorant persons ima- 

 gine that it has been adulterated with sugar, and that the 

 coarse grains are lumps of sugar. 



