How We Harvested & Packaged Our First Honeycomb

Note: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link for the silicone mold. If you click through and make a purchase, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. All other links are informational only. Thank you for supporting our hive!

At Bee Natural and Bee Api, we recently completed our first-ever harvest of cut comb honey – a milestone that’s been highly requested and long awaited.

The reason it’s taken us a while is that honeycomb isn’t your average honey harvest. The process is a little more delicate, precise and labor-intensive – for both us and for the bees.

You can watch the process in the video or read on to find out more in-depth about the uniqueness of honeycomb production.

The Setup: Why Honeycomb Needs a Different Approach

With regular honey harvesting, bees create the honeycomb structure with beeswax, fill the cells with honey and then cap it over with another thin layer of beeswax.
When we extract the honey we cut off the thin layer of beeswax on top of the honey to expose the liquid. The frames are then put in an extractor which spins the frames, releases the honey and leaves the honeycomb base fully intact.
We can give these ‘drawn frames’ back to the bees and help them get back to filling with honey as fast as possible instead of having to build the wax structure again.
Having the frames with drawn comb is a huge time/energy saving for both beekeeper and bees as it takes about 8 pounds of honey for bees to produce just 1 pound of beeswax and a huge amount of effort for the bees to create.
But with comb honey, we take the entire beeswax comb. So when we harvest honeycomb, we’re also taking their foundational building material – the beeswax- along with the honey and this is why we only do it occasionally and always with deep gratitude.
To start the process we give the bees a very thin wax foundation that we make ourselves from local beeswax and using this silicone foundation maker. This starter layer of wax acts as a gentle guide and the bees create the rest. You can see the video we did on this set up here

The Harvest: Fume Boards, Leaf Blowers & Bee-Whispering

To harvest honeycomb we have to be as gentle as possible. Rather than pulling out the individual frames whilst in the field we cleared the whole box of bees using a combination of a fume board with Honey Bandit, an essential oil-based bee repellent that clears bees without chemicals or smoke and leaf blower.

We avoid using too much smoke with any honey harvest because it can alter the taste of the honey.

Extracting the Comb: DIY & Delicious

We ordered a fancy honeycomb cutter but it had not arrived in time so we used a utility knife and template of cardboard to carefully cut the comb to size. The comb was placed on a stainless steel metal grill to drip excess honey so it would look good in the package.

The fancy honeycomb boxes were on the same shipment as the cutter so we instead used eco-friendly, non-plastic containers that we purchased locally from 100% Green. They were perfect for the purpose.

The Result: Bee-autiful, Edible Gold

Honeycomb is beautiful. We have so much gratitude for the bees for their masterpiece. Each comb is:

* Raw & unfiltered – just as the bees made it
* Packed with enzymes, pollen, and antioxidants – the healthiest sweet treat
* Deliciously chewable – the beeswax is like chewing gum and after all the sweet honey is extracted you discard it.
* Harvested with care – to protect both the bees and the natural flavour

Watch It Happen

To see the process from start to finish including laughs, buzzing bees and some very delicious looking honeycomb Watch the video here