Getting Wild Honey from the Honeycomb

A beekeeper friend of ours gave us some honeycomb from some wild bees that he found in the woods.  We cut pieces off of it and used it to sweeten our coffee, but the wax made a real mess in the coffee cups which was hard to clean.  So we decided to go ahead and extract the remaining honey from the comb.  Bees cap the cells of the comb with beeswax.  To extract the honey, you have to uncap it.  Professional beekeepers use a hot knife to uncap it and then they have an extractor that uses centrifugal force to spin the honey out.  Of course we don't have any of that.

We just used a knife to cut through the beeswax-sealed honeycomb, exposing the honey.  You can see the sealed cells at the very bottom of the photo below and the cut open cells on top.

Capped and Uncapped honeycomb

On the left hand side of the picture below, you can see a cell that is bright yellow in color.  That's pollen!  Bees go out and collect pollen from male flowers.  They collect the pollen in pollen baskets on their back legs.  Maybe you've seen bees with large yellow "bags" on their back legs?  Anyway, they carry it back to the hive.  It will be used as food for the baby bees.  Pollen is high in protein. Bees will store this pollen in an empty cell that is used as a pantry for storing their food.

A cell filled with pollen

Since I don't have fancy beekeeping equipment, I tried to remove the honey the best way I could.  I just cut up the honeycomb to uncap it, put it in a colander that sat over a pot that sat over a skillet of hot water.  I used a potato masher to coax the honey out.

Mashed up honeycomb

You can see lots of pollen once the honeycomb is mashed. 

I lifted up the colander to see if we were getting any honey and... we were!  I left it overnight to drip.

American Honey

The next morning I used a rubber spatula to scrape all the honey off of the pot and into a half pint jar.

Now we didn't get much honey, but we only had a few pieces of the honeycomb.  It was still neat to actually see what getting the honey out of the honeycomb was all about.

A little bit of honey

And even though it was just a little bit of honey, we will use it to sweeten our coffee... without the mess that we experienced earlier when we put the whole chunk of honeycomb in the coffee cup.