—Strained honey is a variety of extracted honey which from the broken or fragmentary combs is allowed to flow by gravity or by gentle pressure. In such cases, naturally, the cell or honey comb is destroyed. The residual comb is sent to market as beeswax.
Properties of Honey.
—Honey at ordinary temperature is a viscous liquid of a tint varying from almost colorless to almost black, according to the character of the flowers and the season in which it is gathered and the length of time of storage. It contains from 15 to 25 percent of water and usually has a small quantity of foreign substances, incident to its manufacture, such as particles of dust, pollen, fragments of bees, fragments of comb, etc. Honey, therefore, is a somewhat concentrated solution of sugars and these sugars are the natural products of the flowers of plants, modified to some extent, by passing through the organism of the bee. In passage through the bee the honey is impregnated with a small quantity of an acid, named from the ant, formic acid. It also suffers other changes which are very strongly marked in flavor and aroma but which cannot be very readily traced chemically.
Polarization.
—Pure honey, that is, honey gathered solely from the saccharine exudations of flowers at the ordinary temperature of the laboratory, namely, from 65 to 85 degrees F., has the faculty of turning a plane of polarized light to the left, which is just the opposite of the optical properties of cane sugar. Whenever a honey shows a right-handed polarization it is a cause for suspicion respecting its purity. A honey of this kind has either been made by feeding the bees a sugar sirup or by the gathering, on the part of the bees, of the saccharine exudation, before alluded to, known as honey dew. It is perfectly true that bees may have gathered honey in exceptional cases, that is, the saccharine exudations of the plants in general, which will show a right-handed polarization, but this occurs so infrequently as to render it advisable to regard such a honey as abnormal in quality. The polariscope, therefore, becomes an almost indispensable implement in a study of the purity of honey.
Water.
—As has already been stated, the usual content of water in honey is from 15 to 25 percent. It very rarely falls below 15 percent and also very rarely goes above 20 percent. In extremely dry periods it is evident that the content of water becomes less, while in times of rain or at the first advent of the flowers the content of water will be greater. The bee naturally modifies to some extent the content of water in order that the organism may dispose of the product. If the content of water is too small the bee handles the product with difficulty and if the content of water is too large difficulty in gathering and storing the honey on account of the excessive fluidity is experienced. As before intimated, the color of the honey depends largely upon the flower from which it is made. White clover gives a honey almost water-white and among all the honey-producing flowers is perhaps regarded the most highly. On the other hand a plant like the golden rod, which flowers later in the summer, produces honey of a deep yellow and sometimes almost a black tint. The color of honey, therefore, indicates not only the season of the year at which it is stored, becoming darker as the autumn advances, but also the nature of the flower from which it is produced.
Ash.
—The content of mineral matter in honey is extremely small and perhaps is largely due to the mechanical entanglement of dust in the nectar rather than the exudation of actual mineral matter itself from the flower. In some cases the amount of mineral matter is so small as to become a mere trace while in other cases it has been found as high as .3 of one percent. A high content of ash denotes the exposure of the nectar previous to gathering to an infection of dust or to some other abnormal condition. A high ash content, therefore, always indicates that further study should be made respecting the purity of the product.