# Drying Honey or removing moisture



## Macon (Nov 8, 2010)

I wouldn't go thru all that trouble. All you really need is a spot you can close off and run a box fan or some sort like it. Run the fan or fans for about 24 hours or so and bamm you are ready to extract!


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## HONEYDEW (Mar 9, 2007)

A box fan blowing in a closed room will not lower the moisture content of the honey because the moist air stays in the closed room.....


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## WI-beek (Jul 14, 2009)

I dont have a dry room to run a fan on honey. Doing it in the house is not an option, lol!


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## HONEYDEW (Mar 9, 2007)

WI, your idea sound fine...


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## DeeAnna (Nov 5, 2010)

HONEYDEW said:


> A box fan blowing in a closed room will not lower the moisture content of the honey because the moist air stays in the closed room.....


Well, yes, that's what common sense would suggest, but it's not exactly correct from an engineering standpoint. The air in a closed room could indeed be used to dry honey, if the volume of air is large enough, the starting relative humidity (RH) is low, and the temperature fairly warm.

If you are using air at, say, 90% RH, it will not remove much moisture from the honey, no matter how much fresh 90% RH air you blow into the room from the outdoors. The real goal of this problem is to keep the air temperature fairly warm (but under 100 degrees F for good honey quality), keep the relative humidity of the air fairly low, and keep the air circulating over the honey for efficient moisture transfer. 

Drying 1000 lb of honey from, say, 20% moisture to 18% moisture will put only 20 pounds (about 2 1/2 gallons) of water into the air.

I'd be more inclined to think the nasty taste is coming from the nectar source rather than fermentation, to be honest.


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## hpm08161947 (May 16, 2009)

We run a dehumidifier in the honey house. It runs all the time. This morning the humidity in there was 16%. We bring the supers in the day before and it sucks the water right out of them.

A 1000 lbs of honey is probably worth investing in a dehumidifier.


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## Adrian Quiney WI (Sep 14, 2007)

Last year I was in the same position as WIbeek. I had honey barely legal and I didn't feel good about it :-( I like to sell with confidence. I put an old dehumifier and about 12 supers in a small interior room/large closet after 24 hours it had dropped a whole % to 17.8%. The other good thing about a dehumidifying area is that it gives you a little breathing space before extracting. I haven't pulled or processed a lot of honey and I'm slow. I think building a purpose built box is a good idea, I had to carry all the boxes down a flight of stairs and then back up again when I was done.


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## megank (Mar 28, 2006)

HONEYDEW said:


> A box fan blowing in a closed room will not lower the moisture content of the honey because the moist air stays in the closed room.....


Sure it will. If there is no air movement then the vapor pressure of H20 between the honey and air are in equilibrium, However, if moving air passes over the honey it will lower the vapor pressure of the H20 of the honey and the equilibrium will shift to the right allowing excess moisture to leave the honey. Review Roault's Law Of course if he has a hundred boxes in a small garage it will take longer, cuz even a garage is not a closed system.

This is how honeybees are able to evaporate excess moisture from nectar especially in humid climates such as a hive on the East coast


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## HONEYDEW (Mar 9, 2007)

Sorry but the clincher here is the closed room part, a hive is not a closed system therefore moist air has an escape route. A fan in a closed room will not remove moisture no matter how much you think it will, If the room is closed the moisture has no where to go but back into the hygroscopic honey, I run several hundred supers of honey a year and if I am worried then yes a fan gets used, but the moist air must leave the room via a open and close greenhouse louver system....OMTCW


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## megank (Mar 28, 2006)

neither is ones garage...I bet there's lots of open crevasses in which fresh air will circulate about. Anyway method used to reduce the partial preasure of water vapor ie air flow WILL cause the equilibrium to shift to the right.

Oh and what is a bi product of plant respiration? Water....lots of it.


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## BeekeepingIsGood (Aug 12, 2012)

I've learned a lot from this forum.

I've had good success the last couple years drying honey. Sometimes with a dehumidifier and sometimes without. This shows what I've been doing:


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## crofter (May 5, 2011)

What is missing here is the influence temperature has upon the equilibrium point of moisture transfer from honey to air or _vice versa_. Moving air will increase the transfer rate up to the saturation point of air at that temperature. What could influence someones experience of success in the closed room scenario is the fact that the perhaps tons of wood, drywall etc., in the surrounding room are quite capable of absorbing considerable moisture from the circulating air. Humidity and temperature of any makeup air infiltration could be widely variable too. Lots of room for quibbling there!

What we do know is that a compressor dehumidifier does do the job without question since it does not depend on the humidity of the ambient air: the fan alone solution has lots of if's, and's, and but's about it. 

In any case


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## burns375 (Jul 15, 2013)

I dry all my combs even capped stuff for 24-48 hours in a 85-95F closet with a dehumidier and box fan placed on the stack. Works really well.

You could dry without dehumidifier in an air conditioned low humidity home but it would be slower and the honey is a little colder than ide like for easy extraction.


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## BeekeepingIsGood (Aug 12, 2012)

crofter said:


> What is missing here is the influence temperature has upon the equilibrium point of moisture transfer from honey to air or _vice versa_.


Does it matter? I just figured the relative humidity is the important thing and that's why the graph in the video didn't bother with it. Of course the relative humidity goes down with increased temps. BTW The Sanford article suggests a minimum temp of 27C. That taffy honey at the end of the video got that dry at 21C. It just took a while. 



> What could influence someones experience of success in the closed room scenario is the fact that the perhaps tons of wood, drywall etc., in the surrounding room are quite capable of absorbing considerable moisture from the circulating air.


Yes. The Sanford paper devotes lots of discussion to ventilation. I'm sure it's very important to vent out the moist air if doing this on an industrial scale + would make things a little more efficient if doing this at a smaller scale. However, a small scale beek drying 10 supers is probably okay if they don't worry about it much. In my case I'm directing the blast of warm dry air from the dehumidifier across the combs.The air around the combs had a lower RH + higher temp than the rest of the room, but even on the other side of the room the RH was under the magic number needed for honey to hit the 17.8% moisture required for the Ontario #1 grade.

Running a dehumidifier in a small room can make that room very hot and therefore drop the RH. In the summer it was so warm in my small room that one or two combs in the direct line of fire of the dehumidifier softened enough to collapse from the heat.


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## Fivej (Apr 4, 2016)

Nice vid BeekeepingIsGood. Thanks for posting it.


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