Take a look inside the real challenges of honey packaging.
We bought a bottling tank this year, so I will no longer have to clean up sticky, dripping honey gates from 5-gallon buckets! This thing is lovely; it came with a little heater so I could keep the honey right under 100° and flowing fast. George built a nice and sturdy rolling cart that I will be painting soon.
This new setup was so much nicer than last year. I placed the sanitized bottles on my left on their little drying doohickie and the scales on my right for weighing! Bottling was a breeze!
Did you know that our food scale must be calibrated every year by a professional? I weigh every bottle before sealing it up. I zero out with the empty bottle and then seal it after weighing so that none of the packaging is counted as the weight of the honey. We are serious about our honey.
I bottled up mostly half-pound bottles this year because we bought them in bulk. Next year, we’ll do the same for the one-pound bottles because the bulk price is so much better. I like to stage purchases, so we are not hit all at once with new bottle fees.
Packaging
There is so much that must be done for packaging honey. The larger bottles have a seal in the lid, so once you screw the lid on, it’s ready to go.
This year, I bought a small box of 3-ounce glass bottles that flew off the counters. The little bottles have metal lids, so they are paired with shrink bands for sealing. That was fun, albeit a tedious task, not due to using a heat gun, but because the bands are so thin and transparent to get apart.
The only real problem with the little bottles was that I couldn’t find small enough labels that would fit my thermal label printer and look good. The label area is very small and half-moon shaped, and I couldn’t find any for my printer. I found some cute little cards, made a 2×2 label, and wrapped them around the lids. I could buy labels from the company that sells the bottles, but they come in bulk, which just didn’t make sense for us. I think mine came out cute, and I am still on the hunt for some half-moons.
That’s it for now, but we do hope to see you at the market this month. We’ll be there on June 13th and June 27th.
♥bee-happy♥
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