Making Honeycomb

There is a couple of different options beekeepers can choose when producing honeycomb/ comb honey. Here we go into detail about what we do here at Branch Creek Honey.

Most honeycomb you see in the supermarket is produced by ‘cutting comb’. This is where a regular honey frame has had the wires that run through the honey removed, is then cut into squares and then packed in plastic boxes. This is a sure way to get honeycomb each year but as you may imagine comes with quite a bit of mess… and unfortunately the honey frame is more or less destroyed so has to be restrung, have new foundation wax added and the bees need to draw out the wax again.

We chose to go down a more traditional path of producing honeycomb… and a bit less messy too! We used two different types of frames, one plastic setup which creates our small honeycomb squares and one wooden setup (traditional English wooden squares) to produce our large honeycomb squares. Both of these frames have special inserts (the square boxes) added with foundation wax, so while the bees still have to do the work of drawing out the wax there is no cutting involved after harvesting. Once the bees have finished the squares of honeycomb we simply harvest, pop them out of the frames and then package them up with very little handling in between. What you get in your square of comb honey is exactly how the bees made it!

Because we use these special frames it makes it a little harder to guarantee production of honeycomb each year. If the bees are having a tough year where the honey flow is not very strong they may struggle to draw out the wax cells as well as fill them up and cap them over with wax. This is because it takes a lot of energy for them to produce wax! With regular honey boxes/ frames the wax will have already been drawn out in a prior season so it takes less effort to fill these up and cap them.

I (Jess) was inspired to craft honeycomb this way as I have very fond memories of Granddad coming home with a perfect wooden square when I was a child… only for me to promptly destroy it with a teaspoon. In my opinion this is the BEST way to eat honey!

If you’d like to try some of our honeycomb for yourself then click here to browse our online store or come along to a market and try before you buy.