Making Creamed Honey

Brenda and Mike with some of their creamed honey.

Brenda and Mike with some of their creamed honey

If you get the American Bee Journal, you may have seen my article about creamed honey in this month’s issue. I wrote the piece because I think smooth creamy honey is a great product and because some friends of mine make some great creamy honey. My friends are Brenda and Mike. Mike mostly works the bees, some of which are kept at Mike’s place in the Rocky Mountain foothills. Brenda mostly handles the honey smoothing at her home.

I don’t know what you might call this extra smooth honey – some people call it creamed (though no dairy products are involved), spun (though no spinning is involved) or smooth (which it certainly is!).  My article goes through a lot of details which I won’t cover here, but I’ll give you Brenda’s recipe:

smooth honey recipe

It’s actually pretty simple. Heat the honey until it’s completely liquid with no granulation crystals left in it. Cool it to room temperature and stir in some creamy ‘seed’ honey. Stir and stir and stir. Pour it into the final containers and store it in a cool place.  The seed can be creamed honey from your previous batch of creamed honey. If this is your first year making the stuff, you’ll have to get some creamy (“spun”) honey at the grocery or from a friend. After that, keep some in reserve for the next crop. People use from 5 to 20 percent seed, but most add about 10 percent.

creamed honey

Once ‘creamed’, the honey will stay this smooth for months – or even years.

About Ron Miksha

Ron Miksha is a bee ecologist working at the University of Calgary. He is also a geophysicist and does a bit of science writing and blogging. Ron has worked as a radio broadcaster, a beekeeper, and Earth scientist. (Ask him about seismic waves.) He's based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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6 Responses to Making Creamed Honey

  1. Emily Scott says:

    Thanks for sharing, sounds nice and simple.

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  2. Colleen says:

    Hi Ron, If I understand correctly, and the only purpose of heating the honey first is to liquefy it if it’s already crystallized, then one can skip that step if using freshly extracted honey, and simply stir the seed honey in?

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    • Ron Miksha says:

      Admittedly, it sounds like a waste of time and energy to heat freshly extracted honey. This step might not be necessary, but most people making spun honey actually do heat their fresh liquid honey because it will often contain some bits of unseen granulation crystals which should be melted.

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  3. Kelly Frizzell says:

    If I did not warm my fresh honey, but have added the seed honey and stirred it over two days(not sure if I stirred enough though). But my question is, can I heat it to make it flow easier to put it into containers?

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    • Ron Miksha says:

      The most trusted method requires that you pour the thoroughly mixed honey into the final containers right away. I suspect that if you heat it, the outermost edges of the container will be somewhat more liquid than the center. You want the whole thing to be the same consistency. If you heat it too much, you may melt the tiny crystals that make the whole thing turn smooth.

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    • Ron Miksha says:

      I should also add that we heat the fresh honey to melt any potential large granules of honey. You want really tiny crystals to get smooth honey. You still might get really nice honey. Let me know how it turns out.

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