Make Friends with the Local Donut Shop

They say if you're looking for a cop you should go to a donut shop. But I think you're more likely to find a beekeeper there.

Why?

It's all about storage.

Honey is food and because it's a food it should be stored in a food safe container.

Just any plastic container won't do. Use Food Grade Plastic to store your honey--that is if your choice of container is plastic.

So what has this got to do with making friends with the local donut shop?

These shops use large pails on a daily basis. They come loaded with donut batter or muffin mix and are thrown away when they're empty. These pails have great fitting lids and they're made with food grade plastic.

Often you can get them for free.

There are other sources to consider as well. The local ice cream store and fast food stores.

Addition: I'm thinking that it's best to avoid pails that have ever had Peanuts in them - like peanut butter pails from bulk food stores, or peanut ice creams. Some people have really severe peanut allergies and it might be possible that even a well washed pail has some residue peanut oil.

Now a caveat about plastic and honey. We filled plastic pails with honey but then it crystallized--see the photo at left. So since last summer we've had to scoop out this hard honey and warm it up in order to jar it.

So this year we're changing our plan and we'll jar all our honey right after extraction.

Jars are much easier to warm up if the honey crystallizes. Of course a metal heated storage tank would be ideal, but that's a major expense.

We'll purchase lots of jars for the sale honey and when they're full we'll fill large glass jars that we've saved -- pickles, pasta sauce jars, etc. This reminds me of years back when we saved all our jars for Mom to use for canning. We did recycling like this for most of my life.

I guess we're back at it again.