By Tim Hiatt
Some honey producers use a heated honey storage tank, some don’t. The idea is that heated honey storage will settle wax and other lighter-than-honey impurities to the top faster than an unheated one. This would result in packers being more pleased with honey which doesn’t plug their strainers as quickly, and would reduce costs for them. This value, added for the producer, would increase the marketability of honey.
In our operation, we’ve never used heated storage, nor do we use a heat exchanger/spinner. Over the years, we have relied on the heat from the hotroom and from a heated sump tank being fed from the extractors. We have always used stainless steel milk tanks for storage, sometimes with extensions attached above to increase capacity. In preparing holes in milk tanks for draining to drums, we ruin the internal refrigeration tubing, so that wasn’t available for circulating heated water. We decided to build a purpose-built tank and try it.
The tank would have an open top for easy cleaning and would be jacketed on the two long sides and the bottom. It would have a pair of electric water heater elements mounted inside the jacket, controlled by water heater thermostats mounted outside the tank, against the jacket. It would have a V-shaped bottom, with drains on the two short sides of the tank at the bottom of the V. The thought about the tank not being fully jacketed was that the two long sides and the bottom would transfer enough heat, and would simplify construction by not having drains pass through the heated jacket.
Once built, we experimented with temperature. The amount of heat applied to the honey is a function of both the temperature of the water in the jacket, and the amount of time the honey spends in the heated tank. There was some concern that water heater thermostats would run too hot and discolor the honey. Adjustments on the thermostat temperature had us constantly turning the heat down.
With more than one tank, our storage capacity allowed us to leave honey settling in tanks for, usually, 36 hours. That is, honey extracted near the end of the day would wait until the second day in the morning before being barreled. Honey extracted by the end of Friday should be barreled Sunday morning, but that’s our day off, so that honey sits until Monday morning, or 60 hours.
With the heated jacket’s temperature at around 110-115º F, we saw a loss of 1-2 mm Pfund in honey stored over the weekend. We didn’t detect discoloration in honey stored for 36 hours. We reduced the set temperature to 105-107º F. As to whether suspended particles decreased due to heated storage, that is unclear. The packers blend our honey with other producers’ honey into the same batch for bottling, so the difference in the end may not be noticeable to them. Reopening drums after barreling looks to me like there’s less material settled to the top compared to honey stored without heating. The heated tank went into service late in the 2025 extract season, so we look forward to working more closely with packers to look for differences between our lots, with and without heated storage.
An unexpected benefit of heated storage is the increased speed at which drums can be filled. With honey stored at ambient temperature, it takes 1-2 minutes or more to fill a drum. That’s with a 3" gate valve and honey coming out of the extract system at 85º F and cooling toward the ambient while stored. Coming out of the heated tank, it flows like 20% moisture honey streaming through the gate valve. A drum fills in much less than a minute. In later season extraction, when outside temperatures are dropping, and honey is getting extremely dry, the heated tank keeps drums filling quickly.
If that were the only benefit of a heated storage tank, it might not be worth it. We will more strictly label lots out of the heated tank and follow up with packers to find out if they see benefits on their end. The tank ended up with a 30-drum capacity and cost $28,000, with more than half of that being materials. Credit goes to the North Dakota Department of Agriculture which administered a USDA grant to pay for a portion of the project.