Why Buy Honey from a Beekeeper Instead of the Grocery Store? The Science of Crystallization

Pick up a jar of honey at the grocery store and it usually looks the same: clear, golden and perfectly runny, month after month. Buy a jar from a beekeeper and it may be liquid in September, cloudy by November and as firm as butter by February. That difference isn't a flaw. It tells you a lot about how the honey was handled between the hive and your kitchen. Here's the science of what happens to honey on the shelf, how beekeepers manage temperature with warming cabinets and storage tanks, and why buying straight from the person who keeps the bees is worth it.

Our raw Quebec Wildflower Honey

What usually happens to grocery-store honey

Most supermarket honey goes through a large packing plant. To keep it clear and pourable on the shelf for as long as possible, many large packers pasteurize it: the honey is flash-heated to around 80 °C for a minute or two, then cooled quickly. The goal is to melt the tiny glucose crystals and remove the air bubbles that would otherwise start crystallization, which pushes it back by up to about a year. The honey is often finely filtered as well, which removes the pollen grains and wax specks that crystals like to form around.

That keeps the jar looking the same for months, but heat has a cost. Heating speeds up the formation of a compound called HMF (hydroxymethylfurfural) and lowers the activity of the honey's natural enzymes, diastase and invertase. International honey standards use HMF and diastase as markers of how much heat and time a honey has been through: the more it's been heated or the longer it's been stored, the higher the HMF and the lower the enzyme activity. Delicate floral aromas also fade with heat.

Supermarket honey is also often a blend of honey from different places. In Canada, imported honey must say Product of followed by the country, and blends say where their honey comes from, so it's worth reading the small print. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency also tests honey for added sugars. In its 2023-2024 food fraud report, 10 of the 84 honey samples it tested failed, and 9 of those were imported. Those samples were targeted at higher-risk products, so they don't represent every jar on the shelf, but it's a good reminder that knowing where your honey comes from matters.

The science: why honey crystallizes on the shelf

Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution. It's roughly 80% sugar and only about 17 to 18% water, far more sugar than that little water can normally keep dissolved. The two main sugars are fructose and glucose, and they behave very differently:

• Fructose dissolves easily and stays liquid.
• Glucose is much less soluble. Over time it comes out of solution and forms tiny crystals of glucose monohydrate. As more crystals form and grow, they link together and the honey turns cloudy, then thick, then firm. The fructose stays liquid between the crystals.

How fast this happens depends on a few things:

• The flowers. Each nectar has its own fructose-to-glucose ratio. Honeys with more glucose, like clover, dandelion and canola (rapeseed) honey, can set within weeks. Fructose-rich honeys, like acacia, can stay liquid for a year or more. Food scientists use this ratio, and the ratio of glucose to water, to predict how quickly a honey will crystallize.
• Water content. Honey with more water crystallizes more slowly, while drier honey with lots of glucose sets faster and more completely.
• Something to grow on. Crystals need a starting point: a speck of pollen or wax, a tiny air bubble or an existing micro-crystal. That's why raw honey, which still has its natural pollen, tends to crystallize sooner than heavily filtered honey.
• Temperature. This is the big one. Honey crystallizes fastest between about 10 and 15 °C, which is the temperature of a cool pantry, a cold cellar or an unheated warehouse. Below about 10 °C the honey gets so thick that the molecules move slowly and crystallization slows down. Above about 25 °C, glucose stays dissolved more easily, and at 30 °C and higher existing crystals start to melt. In the freezer, crystallization practically stops.

Temperature also decides the texture. When honey crystallizes slowly at room temperature, it tends to form fewer, larger crystals and feels coarse and gritty. When it crystallizes in the cooler range, it forms many small crystals and feels smoother. On a store shelf, honey can go through cold trucks, cool warehouses and warm store aisles before it reaches you, and those ups and downs can lead to uneven, grainy crystals.

One more thing happens as honey crystallizes: since the crystals take sugar out of the liquid part, the liquid left between them becomes slightly more watery. If a jar half-crystallizes and then sits somewhere warm for a long time, that wetter layer is more prone to fermenting. That's one reason careful storage matters.

The good news: crystallization is completely natural. It isn't spoilage, and the honey is just as good to eat. It also isn't, on its own, proof that a honey is pure or that it isn't. What it does tell you is that the honey hasn't been heavily heated and filtered to stop it from happening. If you want to bring a jar back to liquid, we explain how in Why Natural Honey Crystallizes and What to Do When It Happens.

How beekeepers keep honey at the right temperature

Beekeepers who sell their own honey can't pasteurize it without losing what makes it special, so instead they manage temperature carefully at every step. A lot of that happens with two pieces of equipment: storage tanks and warming cabinets.

Settling and bottling tanks

After the frames are uncapped and spun in the extractor, the honey is strained and poured into a stainless-steel tank with a tap at the bottom, called a honey gate. There it rests for a while. Air bubbles and tiny bits of wax float to the top, and the clear honey underneath is drawn off from the bottom straight into jars or pails. Many bottling tanks have a heated base or jacket with a thermostat, so the honey can be kept just warm enough to flow smoothly during a long day of jarring without being cooked. Honey is also stored in sealed food-grade pails or tanks, because it easily absorbs moisture from the air, and extra water is what lets it ferment.

Our raw honey, available by the pail

Warming cabinets

Honey from the summer harvest is often stored in bulk and jarred a little at a time throughout the year. By winter, much of it has crystallized in the pails. To make it liquid again, beekeepers use a warming cabinet: an insulated box with a heater, a fan and a precise thermostat. Pails go in and are warmed slowly and evenly, often over a day or two, until the crystals dissolve.

The key is gentle heat. Inside a hive, bees keep the brood area at about 35 °C, so that temperature is a natural reference point. Beekeepers generally keep decrystallizing honey between about 35 and 40 °C. That's warm enough to melt the crystals but far below the roughly 80 °C used for commercial pasteurization, and slow, controlled warming avoids hot spots that would darken the honey or change its taste.

Creamed honey: crystallization on purpose

Beekeepers also use crystallization to their advantage. To make creamed (whipped) honey, they stir finely crystallized honey into liquid honey and keep it at a cool, steady temperature, around 14 °C, while it sets. Because it starts with lots of tiny crystals, it sets into millions of small ones instead of a few big ones, and the result is smooth and spreadable instead of gritty. Our Whipped Honey is made this way: 100% raw honey, with a little finely crystallized honey blended in and whipped, and nothing else added.

Our Whipped Honey: smooth, creamy raw Quebec honey

More reasons to buy honey straight from a beekeeper

• You know where it comes from. A beekeeper can tell you where the hives are, which season the honey was harvested in and what was blooming. Spring and fall honey from the same hives can taste completely different; we compare them in Quebec Spring vs Fall Honey.
• Less processing. Raw honey is strained to remove bits of wax and bees, not heated to 80 °C or finely filtered, so it keeps its natural pollen, aroma and flavour.
• Fresher jars. Small producers usually jar their honey in small batches as it's needed, so it hasn't spent months in a warehouse.
• You can ask questions. At a market stall, you can taste, compare and ask how the honey was harvested and stored.
• You support local bees. Buying from a local beekeeper helps keep hives, and the pollination they provide, in your region.

How to keep your honey liquid at home

• Store it at room temperature, ideally around 20 to 25 °C, in a closed jar.
• Don't put it in the fridge: that's right in the temperature range where honey crystallizes fastest.
• Keep it away from the stove, the dishwasher and sunny windowsills, where it heats up and cools down every day.
• Always close the lid tightly so it doesn't absorb moisture.
• If it crystallizes, set the jar in a bowl of warm (not boiling) water and stir now and then. Skip the microwave, which heats unevenly.
• Or simply enjoy it as it is: crystallized honey spreads beautifully on toast and doesn't drip.

Taste the difference

We extract and jar our honey ourselves, from our hives around Montreal. Discover our raw Quebec honey, starting with our Wildflower Honey, or come taste it in person at one of our Christmas markets. Have a question about your honey? Write to us at info@mielbrut.com or on Instagram (@mielbrut_com).

Header photo: Vitaly Gariev / Unsplash