Looks like they nest in rotten wood, not soil. They overwinter in soil though, so dump the thing before the fall. Overwintering in freezable bucket would be a questionable idea anyway.

I don’t have any experience with these bees though, just some reading.

Ultimate heatpipe if condenser is replaced with reflux. Well, that’s what heatpipes are.

I remember cooking scrambled eggs on amd topped with a few coins.

Overcooled sugar syrup (what people usually make by heating sugar in water and then cooling down) would technically be a suspension of sugar nanoparticles in saturated syrup. This should totally be more potent for chemical extraction than pure sugar, even after extraction of fluids into it which could only saturate it into syrup phase.

Throwing alcohol into beer preparation souds like illegal move in Finland an USA afaik, LOL

Actually, ectraction must be possible with honey then!

I don’t really think they heated that much, it’s oven temperature, and water was not driven away.

I think you are correct on “melting” part.

Awesome design! I’ll drop a few thoughts on it.

Darkening is just sugar caramelization accelerated greatly by acidity of tips. Just a small pH drop in moisture - and tips are tart - accelerates the process by orders of magnitude.

With high temperature, you lose some volatile stuff unless you have it all sealed (which itself is explosive). I think you can achieve similar extraction by alcohol groups (that’s what sugar does) by adding tips in secondary. But then you won’t have all this caramel. Caramel could come from specialty malt or sugar caramelized separately. Anyway, overdefined problems are just more refined tools for future experiments!

Was this tips extraction simple? And filtration?

The main use of heaters in this setup is to make the “spring” of oscillatory heat system “stiffer”. This should make temperature oscillations faster and smaller in amplitude thus bringing process to more stable state. This is mostly important when you have set temperature close to ambient outside, otherwise you’ll inevitably leak a few watt through fridge insulation anyway, and if it’s not enough you can always prop the door open. Latter would lead to humidity buildup though. If you set process to 20C, obviously, no leak, huge slow oscillations on heating phase.

Then there is diacetyl rest, I’d just recommend taking that thing out for that.

I just shove wires into wax with some two-pronged hard implement (to push on the sides of cell ridge).

I’ve also tried using woodburning iron to melt a few spots of wax to the frame, it worked amazing (and cutting pretty honeycomb from the frame was never easier), but with one catch: if wether is hot and bees are slacking, it deforms faster then they reinforce it and wax rolls off. These frames survived my centrifuge too, the trick is to make syre bees attach it on all sides by, well, tack-soldering on all sides indeed. Will not work with op’s casts and centrifuge though.

Was thinking for a year that casting flat wax and then rolling it with patterned roll press might be better idea. Anyone tried that?

I was just thinking of caramelizing very small fraction of honey for flavor this year out of curiosity, but with my small production it will have to be good honey probably, I’m not at scale where waste appears yet. Although there is a risk to suddenly inhetit an empire from my neighbor.

Could be, the world is wide, though, and I’ll wait till we have more knowledge about it to place a name. Which does not stop me from culinary experimentation!

A fellow beekeeper!

Bochet

TIL proper name for that thing when someone new to the art is being told to “boil your honey really well or mead will spoil”!

How are things done there on the other side of the world? Do you move your bees to fields with these flowers, or is it just arbitrary seasonal labeling that does not really mean you are really collecting that flower dominantly?

Would you want to try my bee sensors that listen to the bees every hour?

We’ve got tired of just fermenting standard wort with different yeast strains for comparison, and we are starting full-sized batches of proper styled beer split and inoculated with very similar yet distinct yeast from the same class. The first in line are Belgian wits. Weather permitting it’ll be outdoor brews! Hopefully this would be fun experience, will try to post inspirational results here.

And spruce tips are coming soon as well, but not yet. There is ground elder everywhere, but I’m reluctant to give it a try in brewing, need to learn to ferment it with lactic first and see if it is any good to my taste.

Yesterday we’ve tasted small batches of… some weird yeast caught in some local beer in UK bar, it certainly looks right under microscope, counts to proper population with more or less typical dynamics… and then fails to change the gravity, yet produces quite distinct flavor. 1040 OG beer starters end up too sweet and disgusting, of course, so we’ve tried instead kombucha-style mix of pale wort and tea, to 1010 OG, sterile, of course. The gravity did not change again, but the flavor! It was not quite like kombucha, but along the lines, and definitely the tea flavor was more distinct that in reference non-inoculated sample, that tasted disgustingly sweet and stale. And somehow this “monoculture combucha” hits in the head. What a weird mutant. Something to research now. Maybe we have a 0% beer magic in our hands?

Looks like extremely short fermentation in mead, dates should accelerate and improve sedimentation, just how fast was it?

Why do you think it’s stalled? Maybe just lemon peel trapped the gas?

I’ve made lots of mead with citrus peel, including lemon, I’ve used in on secondary though, just to keep more flavor by less gas escape. Maybe you should do the same?

Haha, then it always gets reversed, gf drinks brandy and you find yourself enjoying the other thing!

Or maybe I’m just not straight or something lol. Who cares anyway. Just makes me think about it, probably because foamy berries going through the fermenter opening both ways are my fetish.

Ec1118 is a great mead yeast indeed.

I’m estimating og to be more like 1130 with your numbers unless the honey was really wet.

What’s the plan for fermentation time?

Wait! Don’t throw it all away, I want to know! Can you sample like 50ml of that poison and send it to me?

A pity I can’t throw you a tube of yeast this fast! Good luck!

Misread proportion, it’s 1dl/1.5l for starter, quite small sugar content indeed, should be fine even if it was somewhat spoiled

Now here the most suspicious part is yeast nutrient. Like any fertilizer, it does turn into poison when used excessively, especially in first hours of adaptation when cell machinery is being adjusted to new environment. One hour starter is too short even for 1 budding, but induces extra state transition stress onto yeast. Proper starter time should be at least 6 hours, 24 is recommended, to drive yeast to exponential-plateau transition region. Short starters are useful for rehydration of dry yeast; of course, no budding or multiplication happens there - and thus best medium for dry yeast rehydration is sterile (or boiled) water with no food nor nutrient.

Nutrient dosage might be surprisingly hard problem in small volumes, as many products are powdered mixtures of various compounds, naturally as homogeneous as you’ve mixed them, and with size of particles getting close to size of dose, it’s easy to skew composition just by sampling.

You’ve probably got around 40% sugar in that syrup solution, which is higher than what I use for sweet mead recipes. I’m not sure lager yeast can tolerate this gravity, although it could, I was just planning to explore that dimention this year, mead on beer yeast.

Neither of this explains later yeasts not starting, unless there was enough nutrient to make whole batch salty. Let me know if I can help you troubleshooting this system further, I’m sad and curious now.