As the honey season comes to a close and extracting and bottling is done, or still in progress depending on your location, I thought I would show some of my honey bottles and jars collected over the years.
Among the first specialized honey jars is probably a Muth jar from Chas. Muth of Cincinnati, Ohio, who sold square jars featuring a single skep on a low table (see Figure 1). The jar survived with its cork and bits of shiny thin closing foil around the neck of the bottle, a remarkable sight. Original Muth jars are becoming rare.
(Honey Acres reproduced this bottle, but those bottles are clearly marked on the bottom of the bottle with “Honey Acres.” Older bottles have cryptic letters and numbers indicating the bottle’s origin. The seam of a modern Honey Acres bottle should run through the side and the lip of the bottle. Older bottles have the lip of the bottle attached as a separate piece, and the seam does not run through it.)
This old Muth bottle is so stunning because on its flat side is the label surviving well over a century (see Figure 2). Most of the picture remains. The historic image, full of information, is slowly disappearing. I even keep this jar in a special dark ventilated box to slow the fading. The text below the image is “chipping “ away in little chunks, leaving a speckle of paper with text interspersed with glass like some missing-word puzzle. Eventually, Time will win. The beekeeper and extractor will fade off to an amber oblivion, and all the text will scatter. I can stall that victory –– with photography.
Figure 2 shows a closeup of the label; at the right is a beekeeper, a progressive beekeeper for the time, who has invested in an expensive honey extractor. The extractor design dates the label and possibly the jar to circa 1870s. (Going out of that decade, the early 1880s would be more likely because news of the extractor came late in the 1860s [Langstroth, 1868], more below). The beekeeper holds a frame of possibly open cells; the comb would have just been removed from the extractor. Or the amber in the cells could have been honey in the cells, and the frame, just uncapped, was about to be inserted into the extractor. Either way, the beekeeper is at work separating liquid honey from the comb …
