How To Use A Refractometer - How to Measure Moisture Content of Honey - Why Does Honey Ferment?

Today I'm going to show you how to use a refractometer. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I've had a number of requests for this video, and that is how to use a refractometer, or a refractometer, however you want to say it. What this device does here is it measures the sugar content and it measures the moisture content. So it measures the sugar content in something that's called Brix, And it measures the moisture content as a percentage of moisture. Now, in terms of honey, you don't really need to worry about the Brix reading. It's not really relevant to what we're trying to work out here. First question I'm going to ask is, why do you need to use a refractometer? The next question is, when should you use one? So the first one is, you use a refractometer to determine the moisture content of honey within the hive and within the bucket and within the jar. I do not go out to hives when they're looking like this. Looking pretty nice, if I do say so myself. It's such a nice sunny day down here at the River Apiary, and I don't go through every single frame scraping a little bit of honey off, putting it on the device here, reading what the moisture content is, doing that on numerous frames, trying to average it out. Definitely don't do any of that. So I'm going to show you it down here today just on some honey because I thought it's nicer than doing it in the extraction room. But for me, I never bring this down to the apiary. Don't think it really has a place down here. And the reason I say that is it's so easy to give you a rough guide on the moisture content of honey by looking at how well capped the frames are. So if a frame is 100% capped, you can extract that frame, no problem. There is no way the bees are going to cap over a frame if the moisture content isn't at the correct level. And it leads me on to another point. So we're kind of going off on numerous tangents here. But if the moisture content of honey is too high, then that honey is not going to store well and it's going to ferment with natural yeasts and bacteria. You might have seen this if you've ever had a jar of honey that's too high in moisture content. The lids occasionally pop, and sometimes when you open them, you get a little bit of a fizz. You get a bit of a tang to the honey as well, and there's CO2 that's produced. That's what gives it the fizz, and that's what gives it the air bubbles. That's what we're trying to prevent. So this is pretty much your last line of defense. And what I'm going to do in today's video is I'm going to show you how to use a refractometer, and I'm going to talk about when is best to use it. I'm going to give you an example just picking out some honey from a hive as well. However, if you're going to get yourself a refractometer, I would say the only time you really need to be worrying too much about it is when you're going to go and put it into buckets. That's all I do, because I'm pretty confident that just by using my own judgment of how well capped that honey is. This is like the last line of defense, and this just gives me a kind of bit of a quality score in terms of the moisture content of that honey that I use for all of my records that I can feed back to if anything goes wrong. Now, that's not to say that that is the right way of doing it. I think there's other ways of doing it as well. What I'm definitely not gonna do though is go through each and every frame, each and every batch in the apiary and start measuring. However, this video is how to use a refractometer, so I'm gonna show you how to do it now. I'll get my bee suit on, I'm gonna go and grab a couple of frames of honey. We'll do it over there with the bees, so there'll be some bees flying around. I'll do my very best to try and get some images inside the refractometer as well to show you the different percentages. It is the most simple tool in the world to use. I'll show you how to use it now. So when you open the box, you get various little bits in here. The first thing you'll see is some calibration oil. Now, whatever you do, don't lose your calibration oil. You'll need that when you come to recalibrate that. It's good to do that 2 or 3 times a year. I'm not going to cover that in this video though, I'll do that on a separate video, but keep that little vial safe. You then get a nifty little towel, that's to obviously clean off in between uses, and you get a little screwdriver as well to open it up. But this is what we're talking about here. It's such a simple device. So a refractometer works by refracting light, and it refracts the light through the honey to give you a reading, and that reading gives you the moisture content of the honey. This piece up here, all you do is you take that back, you smear on a nice piece of honey, cover that gauge all the way over, and then you flip that back down like that, and then you look into the eye view. So holding that up to the light there, I've not got anything in at the moment, but that is what you're going to see inside when you put your eye up to it. And you can see in the middle you've got your Brix, which is your sugar content rating. And then what you're looking for is that right-hand side column. That is the water percentage. And for honey, we're looking for under 20%. And to be honest, I like to get it around 17 or 18%. That's kind of really my target water content percentage. So really nice simple device. Just run over that again. You get your honey, you smear it on there, you close that down until it covers all of that with honey, don't leave any gaps, and then you look down there, hold it up to the light, and it gives you a really simple reading. The refractometer though is a really nice simple piece of kit. All it does is it refracts the light going through whatever you're putting in it. I only ever put honey in mine, and then you're targeting under 20%. That's what it legally needs to be to be called honey, but I think a safer percentage to go for is below 18%. In between say 17 and 18% is a really, really good guide. Heather honey is the only real exception that we work with. And that is around 23% as an absolute maximum, and we like to try and get that around the 21-22%. If any of your honey is going to ferment, it's going to be your heather honey, so it's worthwhile doing a few tests with the refractometer just to make sure it's under the correct moisture content. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'm going to go and pick out a couple of frames. Let's do a few tests, see what the moisture content is of some of the honey in the hive. Right, so I've got everything set up here. It's just luxury down here today, it's about 24 degrees, And it's the last week of September. The boxes are absolutely jam-packed, like they're so heavy. They've only had one feed down here and they only got a couple of litres each, so they have packed in lots and lots of honey, really working the Himalayan balsam hard and moving on to the ivy now as well. I'm gonna pull out a couple of frames though. I'm gonna try and get a bit of a cross-section, one that's fully capped, one that looks to be around the right moisture content but not capped, And then I'm going to try and take a look at some nectar as well. I'm going to do that in reverse order though, because I don't want to have to clean that up too much each time, and I don't want the nectar interfering with the lower moisture content honey. So first one I'm going to try and find is some nice nectar. We'll take a look at the moisture content through the refractometer. Right, so here is the first frame, and as you'll see, one or two capped cells. Hopefully you can see in there though, we've got some nectar in there. Done the shake test on it, so it's not going to be super, super high, but this is going to be the, the highest moisture content version that I'm going to check here. Definitely nectar. So I'm going to get some of that on the hive tool, put it onto the refractometer, and I'm going to show you what the moisture content is when the frames look like this. So all I'm going to do, just get some off on the hive tool here. You don't need much, and you can already see there it's a very, very light liquid. here, but it's not going to be a super high moisture content. They're going to have taken that down a little bit here. So as you can see, it's not dripping off. I'm going to have a guess. I'm going to say 20% for this one here. So we'll get it into the refractometer and we'll take a look at the percentage. So this is nearly impossible to do. I've only got one tripod and it's over there. So all you're going to do is you're just going to take the clear liquid and you're just going to droop that onto the little gauge down there. Not going to try and scratch it. I'm trying to do it one-handed though. You don't need a huge amount on there. If I get my thumb, maybe that'll get a bit of it off. Right, so there we go. I had to do that with another hand, it was impossible. So all you want to do is just get it all over the gauge like that, wipe your fingers, close the lid, and you'll see you want to get a perfect seal all the way across. Doesn't matter if it goes out a little bit, and that is how it should be sealed. You don't want any air bubbles in there. That is perfect. So then you want to take a look through it, and it's very difficult to line up the cameras here, but you can see, wow, that is incredibly low, the moisture content. Much lower than I thought it was going to be. So they've already worked that down, and that is about 16% moisture. That would be more than acceptable in terms of moisture content. In fact, that's excellent moisture content, and you will see But I've taken that from uncapped cells. So let's clean the refractometer off. I'll wipe it down and I'll get another sample out from the hive now. Right, so here's another frame that I've got and it's a little bit looser, the honey in this one. You can see it dribbling off there, so this is going to hopefully give us a bit of a higher reading. Yeah, this should work well. I'm going to go right to the outer edge because that's probably where the moisture content is going to be the highest. And you can see that that's dripping off nicely now. So I'm going to get some of this and I'm going to apply that back onto the refractometer again. I'm going to see what the moisture content is. Right, so we're loaded up again now. You take that down, you push it, you see you want all of the air bubbles out. That's all the air bubbles out. And then you look it up into the light and it will give you that reading again. So going on the last one, I think there's not too much nectar that's that high moisture content in at the moment. So maybe this one's going to be around 17 or 18%, but let's have a look, see what it is. So there you go, hopefully you can see that. Definitely a little bit higher, but it just goes to show they really are working it down very quickly at this time of year. That one there is 17%, and again, not capped over, but that would be no problem at all extracting that. That's sitting at 17%. Right, I'll do another one from the capped honey up here. Just get those cappings off, get inside, get some of that honey. Try not to get any wax on it. Just going to wipe the wax off. Just want the clear honey in there. Very, very light honey, this. They are working the Himalayan balsam, and it is an incredibly light honey. Almost no colour whatsoever to it. Sorry, Mr. Bee, you need to get out of the way. So I'm going to take that and again I'm going to apply it onto the refractometer here. You only need a really, really thin strip. Try and avoid getting any wax on it. And then same as before, take that down, make sure all of the air bubbles are out, and then we look at it again. So hopefully you can see that again. Really difficult getting it to focus in there. 17%. So really good example of the bit that was capped over and the bit that wasn't capped over was exactly the same moisture content. This is what you're aiming for. Like I said, 17 to 18%, absolutely perfect. I want to find one that's a little bit higher moisture content, so I'm going to dig around some of the hives, see if I can find one. Okay, this one here is probably going to be my best shot in this apiary, but they really are fanning it down at a crazy level at the moment. Get a little bit of this one onto the hive tool. Again, still looks quite viscous. We'll take a sample though and we'll get that onto the refractometer and see what the moisture content's like. Right, finally I've found something that's a little bit borderline. So it just goes to show though, the time of the year, the bees are fanning it down so quickly because there's so many bees in the hive. They can get that temperature up really high, get that content down. But that one there is sitting at 19.2. Just ignore the bricks rating. That's not what you're looking for. You're looking for that moisture content, and even that one there—that is still considered to be honey. So it shouldn't ferment, but I always aim for around 17 or 18 percent, and that is probably going to be the highest moisture content that we'll find in this apiary. So there you go. Simple as that. Very sticky. The bees didn't mind too much doing it here. Got a few Kimberly Clark sponsored hives. I've taken the honey from them and they've given us the readings to show us that this late in the year, the moisture content is very, very low indeed. Struggling to find anything above 20%, and 20% seems to be the mark where it might ferment, it might not. But if you can go through your buckets and check it on everything that's coming out your extractor, make sure it's under 20% and ideally around 17 or 18%. It will pay for itself. 100 times over, just doing that check. And then if you find yourself with buckets of honey that are too high, there are ways that you can reduce the moisture content down with very, very little work indeed. I will cover that in a separate video because I found myself in that situation before, and it's probably worthwhile doing with heather honey anyway. So there you go, simple as that. I've been meaning to do that video for absolutely ages, and we're moving into October now, back end of September, Beginning of October, and I get a little bit of time. This is the best time of the year for me to do the videos that I've forgotten to do or not had the time to do all the way throughout the year. I hope you enjoyed that video though. I hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.