> The one cause that hit me was that no drying of high moisture honey was allowed which included leaving stacked supers in a room containing a dehumidifier.
> I leave uncapped stacks of supers, where the supers are stacked crosswise to those above and below for 7 days before extracting.
> What am I doing that would result in my honey being rejected?
I think that the "drying of high moisture honey" was intended to mean "no heat".
The higher heat would raise the HMF level above what they set as a "standard" for your particular "region".
I do not know how using only a dehumidifier would raise HMF, if temps were cool, but I doubt temps were kept deliberately cool during de-humidification.
So, a few questions, if you want to send them along to Apimondia, a group headed by someone who clearly has enough first-hand, hands on experience in "testing" and "standards" to know better than to allow vagueness and uncertainty turn his honey show into a dystopian lottery...
1) What's my "region"? Is Toronto in the same region as Montreal? What about Buffalo, NY? Detroit, MI? Who decides?
2) I can't enter 21% water-content honey, should I just throw it all out? Leaving it on the hives for weeks to let the bees get all the moisture out would likely raise the HMF even HIGHER than my "hot room" approach. What's a guy to do?
3) If my honey was rejected due to higher HMF, what was that reading, and what is your assumed maximum for my region? Can ANYONE from my region meet this standard?
4) If my honey was rejected due to some other test, not HMF, how are we to ever address this discrepancy between a legit entry, and a "rejection", which tends to slander the beekeeper's reputation?
5) Does anyone actually think that a full 45% of the honey show entries at Apimondia were from unethical people, and deserved to be "rejected"? Or is the 45% more properly viewed an indictment of the "standards" set?
But, in defense of Apimondia, this kind of thing really does happen all the time - here's one extreme example:
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/new-tests-on-honey-sold-by-couple-in-suicide-pact-31256941.html
https://tinyurl.com/yckzvkp6
Here in the City, we have a similar "problem beekeeper" who had no more than 12 hives up in CT, but has been selling honey by the truckload for more than a decade, both at multiple farmer's markets in CT and NY, to local grocery stores, and via a web site. The farmer's market demands that beekeepers be the producer of the honey they sell, but no one ever audited, or questioned the origin of the honey sold. Photos circulated of pallets of 5-gallon pails of commodity honey sitting in his driveway, at a location lacking the capacity to uncap/extract more than 9 frames at a time using a manual crank. But if someone's life goal is to stand out in all weather, pathetically hawking jars of repackaged bulk honey on street corners to random tourists, they should be pitied, as this is further proof of the need for better math education. That racket might make a fellow a "living", but not a good one.
The days are long gone when a blue ribbon at the country fair or state fair had any meaning to the consumer. Bogus terms like "raw", and "unfiltered" seem to have more impact. People (claim to) add "CBD" to honey, and it flies off the shelf. My health food stores all have bright yellow hang tags that flag the shelf location of my honey, and they tell the strict truth - that if the hives were any nearer the store, customers might get stung.
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