Cement Honey
Lexikon
Cement honey is the term for honey that crystallizes so hard, due to a high proportion of the trisaccharide melezitose, that it can barely be worked at all.
Cement honey is the term for honey that crystallizes so hard, due to a high proportion of the trisaccharide melezitose, that it can barely be worked at all. The name comes from the fact that this honey feels in the comb cells as hard as set cement, which is why it can be neither extracted nor bottled normally without first warming the combs or treating them in some other way.
Cement honey arises above all with forest honey from honeydew left behind by certain aphid species on conifers such as spruce, because this honeydew contains a particularly high proportion of melezitose. For beekeepers, cement honey is doubly problematic, because on the one hand it can hardly be released from the combs with normal extractors, and on the other hand it is also poorly suited for the bees themselves if it remains in the colony as winter feed, because they can barely dissolve it in winter, which can favor diseases such as dysentery or nosema.
To make cement honey usable after all, experienced beekeepers remove the affected combs as early as possible, or let the bees rework the hardened combs again, whereby the crystals are partly dissolved again through this renewed handling. A common mistake is simply leaving affected combs in the colony in the hope that the problem will resolve itself; in fact, further hardening usually only makes the honey harder to process.