Spring Cleaning

San Francisco has been lashed by rain storm after rain storm this month.  There has not been one dry sunny day to go out and check on the bees.  I am leaving town for the month of April and need to get them set up for their spring buildup before I leave.  Usually I have a day or two in March to get some spring cleaning done.  Not this March.  Rain Rain Rain.

I have been reading about setting up swarm traps in spring.  Take your nastiest frames of moldy comb and fill up an old janky box and set it out somewhere in the sun, on top of a roof, anywhere that the scout bees might find it and they just might do you a favor and move into the box instead of the neighbor's attic.  They are attracted to the familiar smell of honeycomb.  It might catch a swarm from your own hives or maybe a swarm from out there in the world.  Just don't forget to check the boxes every week or so since you want to get them into your apiary as soon as you can.  Since they are in a box and not a tree or wall, all you have to do is move the box into your apiary after dark when all the field bees have returned.  Some beekeepers say that if you put a few blades of grass or a stick at the entrance it will alert the bees in the morning when they make their first trip out for the day that they are in a new spot and will need to reorient themselves to find the new hive when they are making their way back home.

I am excited to try this trick this spring.  Our hives usually swarm in April into the big fuchsia colored tea tree in the garden.  Convenient that it is not in a neighbor's yard, but still there is the whole rigmarole of getting up on the ladder and snipping the branch.  Every day this month I have been eying the sky worrying that the sun is going to pop out and trigger a big swarm event before I am ready for it. Or worse, that it will happen while I am gone! 

Today is the first day in weeks that the sun has come out for a few minutes here and there.  My fellow beekeeper, Peter, knocked on my door this morning and let me know that the bees were very active and wondered if I might like to have a look.  You do not have to do much convincing to have me drop everything and play with the bees so I suited up and headed out to have a look see.

We have two hives that are booming.  Three died in the winter.  That is about normal for us so I was sad for them but not surprised.  We hope to split the big hive this week in an attempt to keep them from swarming.  Peter had to meet with his daughter's teacher so I was out there alone poking through our supplies and cleaning up from all the rain damage.  I'd wait for him to get back before we opened the hives since he loves that part as much as I do but could care less about sorting and cleaning.  I am the king of organizing, nothing gives me more pleasure, so I was happily sorting the good from the bad frames, moldy ones in this pile, brittle gray comb in this pile for the swarm trap box, white clean comb for the honey supers, brand new frames with wax foundation in this pile.  After about an hour of cleaning out and scorching the boxes with the propane torch to kill mold and disease spores I had enough boxes for two swarm traps and three hives.  The rest were for honey supers, about 10 stacked up in a pile taller than my head.

apiary after I cleaned it up and got it ready for another spring

The neighborhood blue jay was also happily working on eating up all the dead bees I had shaken out of the frames from the hives that did not survive.  Windfall for him today.    He sits on the beehives or the fence and swoops in and eats bees all day long.  He also comes and taps on my kitchen window in the morning then sits in the plum tree and stares and squawks at me.  (see below)

I took one of the traps and put it up on the back deck facing out into the garden.  I'm not sure where to put the second one.  Up on the roof?  Any excuse to climb around on the house, right?  Now it's time for a lunch break and then, if the sun is still out when Peter gets home, we'll make a split and find a place for the second swarm trap. 

swarm trap on back deck...newly waterproofed so my laundry room no longer leaks.  yay.

discretely placed swarm trap right above the largest window.  You can hardly see it.

White Man's Flies

I have looked all over trying to figure out where I found this information. I think it comes from a yahoo group called something like Historical Honey Bees. But I can't find the danged thing anywhere.  Anyway, these snippets follow the introduction of honeybees into the United States.  

A long standing assumption, is that honeybees "preceded the settlers", and were "seldom met with, at any great distance from the frontier". Typically, this distance is estimated from 20 to perhaps 50 miles in advance of the white man. The first 3 references relate this belief. 


"The Author of A Tour on the Prairies, says the Indians regard thebee as the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and say, that in proportion as the bee advances the Indian and the buffalo retire. The
wild bee is said to be seldom met with at any great distance from the frontier."
Tioga Eagle
February 07, 1849 Wellsboro, Pennsylvania


"As long as civilization, literally speaking, was in the woods, the bee went with it. The earlier settler and the bee were hand in hand, and the former plundered the latter and the latter stung the former with equal persistency through all the changing seasons of the year. The Indians realized in the advent of the bee the beginning of their end."
The Bucks County Gazette
December 04, 1890 Bristol, Pennsylvania


"Swarming, it became known to the Indians as the "white man's fly" and often preceded the settler into the wilderness by a good twenty miles or so. ... "
1948 - The Land / Washington. Page 359


But there is a problem with this belief.  And that is how honeybees reached Illinois, far in advance of the settlers. 
There are accounts of early explorers, traveling through Illinois, recording that they "found bees in many places, used their honey." Less than 50 years from the introduction of honeybees to Virginia in 1622, early records suggest that wild bees were abundant in Illinois. One might expect that bees would have arrived in Illinois sometime around the time which records suggest they reached Indiana in 1793, but they in fact, arrived much earlier. 
How they got there, remains a mystery. 


See Timeline of the advance of honeybees westward to Illinois: 


1622 - Virginia 


1622, Honeybees Imported from Europe.


"By 1649 people in Virginia 'have store of bees in their woods, make plenty of honey and wax…'." 

1698 - Pennsylvania


"In Swedish settlements in Pennsylvania between 1630 and 1707, `Bees thrive and multiply exceedingly… 
the Sweeds often get great store of them in the woods where they are free for any Body …'." 




"1698" (Source Oertel, E. 1976, Early Records of 
Honey Bees in the Eastern United States, 
ABJ 116, 5 parts, Feb.-June.)


=====


1754 - Ohio 


1754, Probably Spread by Swarming.
(Source: Eva Crane, World History of 
Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, Pg. 359) 


"1788" (Source Oertel, E. 1976, Early Records of 
Honey Bees in the Eastern United States, 
ABJ 116, 5 parts, Feb.-June.)


=====


1793 - Indiana 


1793 , Probably Spread by Swarming.
(Source: Eva Crane, World History of 
Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, Pg. 359) 


=====

thanks to Historical Honeybee

11 Execs, 6 Foreign Firms Caught in Honey Sting

found on the AOL news site
and reported by

Andrew Schneider Senior Public Health Correspondent

AOL News

 
(Sept. 2) -- U.S. consumers stand a better chance of buying honey free of drugs, chemicals and other illegal contaminants because investigators from several federal agencies have scooped up some of the biggest players in the sticky, international honey-laundering maze.

A 70-page indictment, released in Chicago by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, reads like Cliffs Notes for a spy novel: smuggling, bogus shipping papers, phony lab tests, shipments to Chicago warehouses and small honey-packing plants in Washington's Cascade Mountains. All that's missing is the sex.

Eleven Chinese and German executives and six of their food supply and honey export companies were charged Wednesday with 44 counts of conspiring to illegally import Chinese-origin honey, including honey tainted with antibiotics, into the U.S. by mislabeling it as originating in other countries to avoid paying anti-dumping fees, Fitzgerald said.

Why the foreign intrigue with something as benign and universally loved as honey?

The one-word answer is money. Tens of millions of dollars, and that's just what the field agents and federal prosecutors can prove at this point.

These are not nickel-and-dime scams.

"They are charged with conspiring to import more than $40 million of Chinese honey to avoid paying anti-dumping duties of approximately $80 million," said Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in the Pacific Northwest. (HSI was formally known as ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

Illegal Additives Create Health Problems

Fitzgerald said the defendants were distributing "adulterated honey that never should have reached the U.S. marketplace."

The adulterants -- illegal additives that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says cannot be permitted in any food product -- included mostly small amounts of the antibiotics and antibacterial drugs Ciprofloxacin, Norfloxacin, Chloramphenicol and Furazolidone.

Health officials say these chemicals can create health problems for just a small percentage of the population with specific chemical sensitivities. Public health experts say the public should never be exposed to unneeded antibiotics.

The Chinese used these drugs in the late 1990s and into the new century to fight off a massive outbreak of bee-killing disease that swept like a tsunami across millions of bee colonies throughout their huge country.

As part of the conspiracy, the indictment alleges that the defendants had honey en route to the U.S. tested by a German laboratory. After they learned that the honey contained antibiotics, it still was to be sold to U.S. customers and even resold to some after it was rejected by others due to the presence of antibiotics.

The thousands of drums of Chinese honey, or sweetened product being sold as honey, allegedly were falsely declared as having originated in Russia, Australia, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.

Sometimes the drums were actually shipped to the second country before being transshipped with new country-of-origin identification to the U.S. Often, the switch was done by just painting the blue drums -- which are almost always used in China -- a different color and typing up bogus shipping papers.

Federal authorities have seized more than 3,200 drums of honey in Seattle; Tacoma, Wash.; Minneapolis; and the Chicago area during the investigations that led to the indictments.

AOL News Watched Inspection
Last September, AOL News watched a honey packer examine rows of steel drums in a bonded customs warehouse near the docks in Tacoma. They were reportedly filled with white honey from Indonesia, according to the importers from Southern California.

The deal didn't smell right to the packer. The price was too low, and that specific type of honey wasn't what Indian bees produce. He even tried to test what was being sold. He popped the bung on several drums, carefully drew out samples of honey from each and squirted the pale, yellow-white syrup into clean jars.

The results were inconclusive, the certified lab reported. The "honey" had to be so thoroughly filtered that it was difficult to say if was even honey, the analyst told the packer.

Eventually, he declined the bargain prices even though the brokers repeatedly told him they were selling hundreds of other drums from the same shipment to other packers.

Problems Were No Secret

The honey laundering and the alleged fraud listed in the indictments has never been a secret among the U.S.'s largest honey importers and packers. All the major players knew who was buying what and at what price. The bogus, mislabeled or transshipped honey stood out, as if it had red flags waving from the shipping pallets, several in the industry told AOL News.

These experienced honey producers knew that tens of thousands of pounds of honey entering the U.S. each year come from countries that raise few bees and have no record of producing honey for export. Their newsletters, conference reports and honey market analysis laid it out in great detail.

Only as the honey industry learned of the pending indictments did it publicly anguish over the problem.

"We estimate that millions of pounds of Chinese honey continue to enter the U.S. from countries that do not have commercial honey businesses." Jill Clark, president of Dutch Gold Honey of Lancaster, Pa., said at a meeting of honey packers this spring.

Warrants Expected for Defendants Still Outside U.S.
Two of the defendants, Stefanie Giesselbach and Magnus von Buddenbrock, were executives of Alfred L. Wolff Inc., the Chicago-based U.S. affiliate of the German corporation, which is believed to be the world's largest honey importer, Fitzgerald reported.

Four were Chinese or Republic of China nationals (three of whom are also cooperating), who have pleaded guilty to related federal charges -- two of them in federal court in Chicago and two others in Seattle. Nine of the accused live abroad, and authorities said arrest warrants will be issued in the U.S. for those defendants living outside the country.

Fitzgerald and Seattle U.S. attorney Jenny Durkan may be the exceptions when it comes to prosecutors going after these smugglers. Federal investigators on the East Coast and the South interviewed by AOL News lamented that their U.S. attorneys thought the illicit honey smuggling was of little importance and not worth pursuing.

However, at least this investigation was a unique example of everyone playing nicely together.

Winchell said that in addition to HSI, FDA, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. attorneys' staffs, ICE attache offices in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Manila worked closely on the investigation. And as one told AOL News, he'd learned more about honey then he ever wanted to know.

Winchell tactfully declined to comment on whether he thought this week's indictments was a wrap-up of the honey laundering or transshipping scams.

However, he said he has a newly created,15-person, full-time team of federal, state and local investigators "closely watching what comes through our ports."

US Honey Makers Take a Swat at Chinese Smugglers

All the more reason to buy locally. 

found on the AOL news site
and reported by

Andrew Schneider Senior Public Health Correspondent

AOL News

(May 6) -- After years of downplaying and even ignoring the problem of illegal and often-tainted foreign honey smuggled onto U.S. grocery shelves and into food products, major North American importers and sellers of the sweet syrup today reversed course, launching a campaign to enlist the public in combating the threat.

"We estimate that millions of pounds of Chinese honey continue to enter the U.S. from countries that do not have commercial honey businesses," said
(May 6) -- After years of downplaying and even ignoring the problem of illegal and often-tainted foreign honey smuggled onto U.S. grocery shelves and into food products, major North American importers and sellers of the sweet syrup today reversed course, launching a campaign to enlist the public in combating the threat.

"We estimate that millions of pounds of Chinese honey continue to enter the U.S. from countries that do not have commercial honey businesses," said Jill Clark, president of Dutch Gold Honey of Lancaster, Pa.

"For example, countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Mongolia raise few bees and have no history of producing honey in commercial quantities, yet have recently exported large amounts of honey to the United States," Clark added in a statement announcing the creation of a website that tells consumers, honey companies, food manufacturers and retailers what actions they can take to help eliminate illegally imported honey.

AFP / Getty Images

A beekeeper harvests honey in Hefei, China, in April. American honey producers are trying stop the flow of illegally imported Chinese honey.

The site, HonestHoney.com, is supported by Dutch Gold, Golden Heritage Foods of Hillsboro, Kan., Burleson's Inc. from Waxahachie, Texas, and Odem International from Rosemere, Quebec, one of North America's largest honey suppliers.

For more than three years, federal investigators have had hit-or-miss successes trying to intercept box-car-sized loads of illegally labeled honey coming into ports on both coasts and along the Gulf of Mexico. More than a dozen arrests have been made of honey launderers, and ongoing investigations are reportedly targeting a number of other major players in the international scam.

Almost all have centered on honey from China intentionally mislabeled as coming from elsewhere to avoid paying stiff import tariffs of up to 500 percent. Honey from that country also attracts scrutiny because it is often contaminated with illegal animal antibiotics.

Those behind the new initiative say the illegal honey sales have cost the U.S. up to $200 million in uncollected import duties in the past two years and threaten the domestic honey business and the future of America's beekeepers.

"When honey is imported illegally, no one can be confident of its true source and quality. Some products are not 100 percent honey and have other quality issues," Clark said.

While many consumers' awareness is limited to the golden liquid in plastic honey bears, in reality most of the honey imported into the U.S. is delivered in 250-gallon or tanker-car-sized loads and ends up as an ingredient in cereals, breads, cookies, crackers, breakfast bars, salad dressings, barbecue sauces, mustards, beverages, ice creams, yogurts and candies. Investigators say that some food processors are prime -- and often willing -- targets for brokers trying to offload lower-cost, bogus honey.

In late April, AOL News reported that the nation's leading honey packers and sellers had gathered for a secret meeting in Chicago to discuss the impact that the smuggling was having on their business. Of the four firms that launched today's public awareness campaign, only Dutch Gold and Golden Heritage were listed as having representatives at the unpublicized roundtable.

And indeed, some of the nation's largest honey packagers and major suppliers have not signed onto the public-education program launched today, indicating that the industry has not coalesced around a solution to the problem. For example, not listed among the participants is Sue Bee, formally known as Sioux Bee Honey, which says it's the country's largest supplier of honey, moving about 40 million pounds each year. The company did not respond to e-mail messages Wednesday night.

Investigations into international honey laundering were first detailed in December 2008 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

New laboratory developments may aid those inquiries going forward. Until recently, only a very busy facility in Germany had the capacity to help the honey trade and criminal investigators verify the true source of the golden nectar. But for the first time, a U.S. lab has succeeded in conducting those tests. Texas A&M University announced last week that Vaughn Bryant, a palynologist and an anthropology professor, is now the only person in the U.S. doing melissopalynology -- the study of pollen in honey that allows identification of its country of origin.

By performing isotopic studies, Bryant says he has examined more than 100 honey samples for importers, exporters, beekeepers and producers with his DNA-based analysis. Many of the samples he analyzed contained labels from other countries when in fact they originated in China but were re-routed to avoid tariffs, the professor said.

Some foreign exporters get around the tariff by mixing honey from different sources; others infuse up to 50 percent high fructose corn syrup into the honey.

And even as U.S. authorities have gained a new investigative tool, it's becoming common now for smugglers to use a process called ultra-filtration that removes the pollen and makes it almost impossible for any laboratory to determine its origin.

"The beekeepers of the U.S. have been pleading with the Food and Drug Administration to enact stricter guidelines about accurate labeling for honey, but that is a long, slow process,'' Bryant said. "Meanwhile, I'm trying to help out here and there, but it's almost impossible to keep up."

The Human Bee Hive

This 'Bee Suit' Suits Him Fine; Norman Gary Billed as 'Human Bee Hive'
Sept. 14, 2010

Emeritus professor Norman Gary wearing 75,000 pounds of bees. (Photos by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

DAVIS--When honey bee expert Norman Gary “suits up,” don’t expect a standard-issued bee suit.
It’s not an “ordinary” bee suit. And what he does is not “ordinary.”
Norman Gary, a retired University of California, Davis entomology professor, wears his bees—thousands of them.
And that suits him just fine. To him, bees are not only a science (study of apiculture), but an adventure.
Gary, 76, who retired in 1994 from UC Davis after a 32-year academic career, will appear Thursday, Sept. 16 on a History Channel show wearing 75,000 bees. The show, part of Stan Lee’s “Super Humans,” is scheduled to be broadcast at 10 p.m., Pacific Time (Channel 64 for local Comcast viewers).
Host-presenter Daniel Browning Smith has billed him as “the human bee hive” and will explore bee behavior and the science behind the bees.

A crew from England filmed Gary in mid-May at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, at Rick Schubert’s Bee Happy Apiaries in Vacaville-Winters and then in a UC Davis open field where the 75,000 bees clustered his entire body.
“That’s about 20 pounds, depending upon how much honey or sugar syrup they have consumed,” Gary said.  “A hungry bee weighs approximately 90 mg and within a minute of active ingestion she can increase her weight to 150 mgs!”
Norman Gary knows bees. And he knows their behavior.
As a beekeeper, he’s kept bees for 62 years and as a researcher, he’s studied them for more than three decades. He’s published more 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and four book chapters.

Norm Gary before the cluster stunt. Click to enlarge.

But he is also a bee wrangler. He trains bees to perform action scenes in movies, television shows and commercials. His credits over the last 35 years include 18 films, including “Fried Green Tomatoes”; more than 70 television shows, including the Johnny Carson and Jay Leno shows; six commercials, and hundreds of live Thriller Bee Shows in the Western states.
Gary estimates he has performed the bee cluster stunt at least 500 times over the past 35 years. He remembers 54 performances at the California State Fair alone.
The History Channel episode may be his last professionally staged bee-cluster stunt, he said. However, he will continue to serve as a bee consultant to video producers and has just written a beginning beekeeping book, “The Honey Bee Hobbyist,” to be published in early December by Bow Tie Press.
“Bees are trainable, if you ask them to perform behaviors that are in their natural behavioral repertoire,” Gary said.
For the shoot, Gary borrowed New World Carniolan bees from Schubert, whose bee stock originated with bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey of the Laidlaw facility.  “Bees are not inclined to sting if they are well fed—happy and content—and are ‘under the influence’ of powerful synthetic queen bee odors—pheromones—which tend to pacify them,” Gary said.

Norman Gary attracting bees. Click to enlarge.

Bees are attracted to pheromones and cluster on drops of pheromones he places on himself.  While at UC Davis, he formulated a pheromone solution that is very effective in controlling bee behavior.
“Bees wrangled by this procedure have no inclination to sting,” he said.  “Stinging behavior occurs naturally near the hive in defense of the entire colony not for the individual bee, because it dies within hours after stinging.  Using this approach I have has as many as a million bees clustered on six people simultaneously “
Gary once trained bees to fly into his mouth to collect food from a small sponge saturated with his patented artificial nectar.  He holds the Guinness World record (109 bees inside his closed mouth for 10 seconds) for the stunt. 
“Most people fear bees,” Gary acknowledged. “They think bees ‘want’ to sting them. Wrong!  They sting only when the nest or colony is attacked or disturbed or when they are trapped in a physical situation where they are crushed.”

Norman Gary, the bee man and the musician. Click to enlarge.

Sometimes, with the heavy weight of the bees on his body, he’ll receive one or two stings per cluster stunt. Sometimes none.
Gary, who began hobby beekeeping at age 15 in Florida, went on to earn a doctorate in apiculture at Cornell University in 1959. During his career, he has worn many hats, including hobby beekeeper, commercial beekeeper, deputy apiary inspector in New York, honey bee research scientist and entomology professor, and adult beekeeping education teacher, and author.
Known internationally for his bee research, Gary was the first to document reproductive behavior of honey bees on film and the first to discover queen bee sex attractant pheromones. He invented a magnetic retrieval capture/recapture system for studying the foraging activities of bees, documenting the distribution and flight range in the field. His other studies revolved around honey bee pollination of agricultural crops, stinging and defensive behavior, and the effects of pesticides on foraging activities, among dozens of others.
Today his life centers around music and bees. He has played music professionally for more than 50 years and for nine years has led a Dixieland band, appropriately known as the Beez Kneez Jazz Band, recording two CDs.  He has performed more than 30 years in the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee, the world’s largest jazz festival.
His instruments include the “B-flat clarinet,” which he plays when he’s covered with bees.
“I’m still very active in bees and music,” Gary said. “It’s a good life.”

from the UC Davis Department of Entomology website

Discovered: Unique bee nests made out of petals

VIA   WIRED

By George Barrow |19 May 2010 |Categories: Wired Science

It's not uncommon for people to fill their homes with flowers to liven up the place, but how about having your house made from them?
Researchers working in Turkey recently discovered a species of bee that builds its nest from flower petals, creating multicoloured homes for their larvae to grow in.

The rare Osmia avoseta bee is one of an estimated 20,000 types of bee, but defies the typical bee image of living in vast numbers in communal hives by fending for themselves and creating single nests for each of their offspring.
Around 75 percent of the world's bee species are solitary. However, the Osmia avoseta is unusual as it creates a triple layered nest to regulate the humidity of its larvae.
The female bees spend up to two days creating the intricate nests by chewing off individual petals and carrying them back to a small burrow in the ground that will help form the shape of the nest. She uses nectar to glue the petals together, and lines the cocoon with mud before adding a final internal layer of petals to protect just one larvae.
A small amount of nutrient -- consisting of nectar and pollen -- is then added to the tiny nest before she lays her egg and seals the nest by folding in the petals and applying more mud. Each bee will build as many as ten nests -- often in close proximity to each other -- measuring less than 1.5 centimetres in length.

It is believed the eggs hatch within three to four days, but it is not know if they remain as larvae throughout the winter before emerging from their petal palace in the spring.
A team from the American Museum of Natural History and another team working in the Fars Province of Iran -- who made the same discovery on the same day -- have published the discovery of the Osmia avoseta bee in the American Museum Novitates.
 

Photo Credit: J. G. Rozen

|

Online Editor: Nate Lanxon

harvesting honey

We had many frames of capped honey from the contaminated hive that needed to be extracted manually. If extracted in a machine we run the risk of spreading the bacterial spores to clean frames.  I am not sure how other people do this but I took a metal spatula and scraped the comb off the wax foundation and plopped it into a large glass jar and set it out in the sun to melt. 

After two days in the sun I poured it through the strainers and into a plastic bucket with a spout attached for easy bottling.  It took about an hour to drain through the three layers of mesh strainers and the paint straining sock.  It looked like about a gallon of honey.  The wax comb got tossed into the compost and covered with straw.  The mouse that lives in the bin will be pretty excited about its sweet windfall. 

I stuck a spoon into the bucket and pulled out a spoonful of honey and noticed that it had a weird rubbery gelatinous texture.  It did not flow like honey but sort of stretched like thin jello.  It tasted fine but the texture was gross.  Not sure what is the matter with it but I do not want to give it to anyone as a gift, that is for sure.  It could be that the honey has less water in it than usual.  The bees dehydrate the nectar until it is the correct ratio of water and sugar.  Maybe this batch somehow was dehydrated too much.  I am thinking about taking a little of it and adding water to see if I can get it to the right consistency.   If that works then I will add water to the rest and have about a gallon of usable honey.  Or I can give it to my friend, Bill, who makes honey mead.  The consistency will not matter to him.  I have another batch sitting in the sun today from another box and hope it does not have the same problem.