The Water in the Honey
A wet September, a rain-forecast harvest and 180 kilograms of honey that reads 19.8 percent water on the refractometer. Under the 20 percent the law allows and over the 18 the beekeepers want. The priory's assistant works out that only 4.3 kilograms of water must leave, why heat is the wrong way to remove it, and what a fan, a dehumidifier and four days can do.
The rain began at four on the Tuesday afternoon, and by six Brother Yann had forty-two frames of honey in the extraction room of Sainte-Anne-des-Landes and a look on his face that Sister Berthe, who kept the accounts, knew from the year of the hail.
"We had to take them," he said. "It was going to come down for a week. The bees were already sulking."
"I did not say a word," said Sister Berthe.
The extraction room was a stone scullery with a stainless sink, a hand-cranked extractor and, on a shelf by the door, a small grey assistant that the priory called Ruche, because the first thing it had been asked, the winter it was fitted, was how many frames fit in a hive. It had a camera on a bracket over the settling tank and a handheld refractometer on a lead, which Yann had been using all evening with the air of a man holding a very small telescope.
"Brother," said Ruche, "may I read you the last three?"
"I know what they are."
"Nineteen point eight, nineteen point nine, nineteen point seven. I have the tank at 180 kilograms. May I tell you what that means?"
Honey is mostly sugar and the rest is mostly water. Good honey is somewhere around seventeen or eighteen parts water in a hundred, a figure set by the bees, who fan the nectar in the hive with their wings until it is thick, and then cap the cell in wax when they judge it done. A frame that is fully capped is honey that the bees have finished. A frame that is not has honey still on its way.
Brother Yann's forty-two frames had come off in a hurry. Most were capped. Some, near the edges of the boxes, were not.
The reason this matters is not the taste. Honey does not spoil, in the ordinary sense, because it is so full of sugar that there is not enough free water for most microbes to use. But wild yeasts live on flowers and in hives and on every spoon, and they are patient. If the water in honey climbs past a line, somewhere near eighteen or nineteen in a hundred, the yeast can begin to eat the sugar. It makes alcohol and carbon dioxide; the lid of the jar bulges, the honey foams and smells of bread and then of vinegar. The legal limit for ordinary honey in the European Union is 20 parts in a hundred of water, and that is a trade rule, not a safety line: honey at 19.8 can be perfectly legal and still ferment on a shelf in July.
"So it can be sold," said Sister Berthe.
"It can be sold, Sister. I would not sell it."
"Why not?"
"Because I do not know what the shelf will be like in July, and neither do the sisters who will buy the jars."
The sums were short, which was what Ruche liked about them.
"The tank holds 180 kilograms at 19.8 percent water," it said. "That is 144.4 kilograms of solid, mostly sugar, and 35.6 kilograms of water. If we want 17.8 percent, which is a safe number for the shelf and one the bees themselves usually reach, the solid stays the same, 144.4 kilograms, and the whole becomes 144.4 over 0.822, which is 175.7 kilograms. So 4.3 kilograms of water must leave. A little over four litres, from a tank of honey."
Brother Yann sat down on an upturned crate. "Four litres. It sounds like nothing."
"It is not nothing. It is 2.4 percent of the weight, and it has to come out of something as thick as treacle. May I tell you what will not work?"
"Boil it," said Yann, who had not slept.
"Heat it, you mean. Honey will lose water if it is warmed, yes. But the sugars and the enzymes in it are the part of honey that is alive, in a manner of speaking, and they start to go over about 40 degrees. Hold honey at 60 for an hour and you can measure it: the chemical that rises as honey is overheated, hydroxymethylfurfural, goes up and the flavour dulls. You would dry it and lose what the customer is buying. And a hot pan is a good place to start a fire in a priory scullery."
"Then?"
"Then air. Honey is hygroscopic, which is a long word for greedy. Left in the open, it drinks water from damp air, or gives it up to dry air. The water in the honey and the water in the room trade until they are even. For honey at about 18 percent water the room that matches it is about 60 percent humidity at twenty degrees. Brittany in September is at 85 and raining. Left here, the honey will not dry. It will get wetter."
Sister Berthe, who had been reading a figure on her phone, looked up. "So the tank is a sponge."
"In a damp room, Sister, yes. That is what I would have got wrong, if I had said nothing: the honey is 19.8 now and it would be 20.5 by Saturday with the lid off."
They did it over four days, and it was not clever.
On Wednesday morning Brother Yann carried the dehumidifier up from the cellar, the big grey one the choir used in March to keep the organ from swelling, and set it in the dry store beside the old bakery, a room with one window and a door that shut. Ruche told him what to watch: air at about 30 degrees, no more, and humidity down to 45 or 50. That is the sort of air that will take water from honey and not harm it.
The honey could not go in as it was. A deep tank of honey is a skin on a pot: only the top few millimetres meet the air, and the water inside has to crawl up to find it. So they poured it into shallow trays, the food-grade ones from the cheese room, a hand deep, and set them on the racks with a small fan turned to the ceiling so that it stirred the air and did not blow on the surface. A film too thin, Ruche warned, would dry too fast at the edges, and one too thick would take a fortnight. A hand was the compromise.
Ruche read the refractometer at nine each morning, at the same temperature each time, because the instrument reads a little differently warm. Brother Yann stirred the trays with a clean paddle every evening so that the dry skin mixed in.
Thursday: 19.4. Friday: 18.8.
"It is going," said Sister Berthe, who had come to look at it, which she did not usually do.
"It is going slowly, as it should," said Ruche. "Honey this thick gives up its water at about a third of a point a day in a room like this. By Monday, 17.9 or 18.0. I would stop there. Dry honey much further and it will crystallise hard in the jar, and the customers will complain that it has gone off, when it has only gone to sugar."
"Which is what they always say," said Yann.
"It is what they always say."
There was a question left over, and Sister Berthe asked it on the Sunday evening, when the reading was 18.1 and the dehumidifier's little tank had caught, by Yann's careful measuring jug, about four litres and a bit, which was slightly more than the sum had promised.
"The extra water," she said. "Where did it come from?"
"Some of it is the honey," said Ruche. "Some of it is the room. A dehumidifier does not know which water it is drinking. It has dried a little of the walls, the bakery floor and the trays, and so it overstates what the honey lost. The refractometer does not make that mistake. That is why I trust the instrument and not the jug."
"And the bees?"
"The bees do not need the sum. They knew when to cap. We took what they had not finished."
Sister Berthe thought about it a moment. "Then the honest label is not 'finished by the bees'," she said.
"The honest label is 'extracted wet, dried in a dehumidified room to 17.9 percent, tested by refractometer, September 2043'. That is longer than most labels. But a jar of honey is not a hard thing to be truthful about."
She wrote it down. On the Monday morning the reading was 17.9, and it stayed there on the Tuesday, and Yann, who had not expected to feel anything, found that he was a little sorry to give the trays back to the cheese room.
The last of the rain went through that night. In the morning the hives stood in a thin clean sunshine, and the bees were out on the ivy, working the last flowers of the year, bringing in nectar as wet as ever and fanning it, in the dark, without any instrument at all.
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This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Sainte-Anne-des-Landes, Brother Yann, Sister Berthe and the assistant Ruche are invented; Brittany is real, the priory is not. The numbers are estimates from standard figures. Honey of 180 kg at 19.8 percent water holds 144.4 kg of solids and 35.6 kg of water; at 17.8 percent the same solids make 175.7 kg, so about 4.3 kg of water leaves. The 20 percent maximum for ordinary honey is from the EU honey directive (2001/110/EC, as amended); the idea that honey above roughly 18 percent water is increasingly liable to ferment, and that honey at about 18 percent is in rough equilibrium with air at about 60 percent relative humidity at 20 C, is the usual rule of thumb in beekeeping guides, and varies with the honey, its yeast count and its storage temperature. The 40 C and 60 C figures are a rough guide to when enzymes and flavour start to suffer; HMF is a real marker of heat damage. The drying rate of a third of a point a day is an invented but plausible figure for a shallow tray in dry, warm air. This is not food-safety or beekeeping advice: follow your national beekeepers' association and food-safety guidance. Do not give honey to babies under one year old.