Honey and Honeycomb

Psalm 19:9-10  King James Version (KJV)

9 The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

10 More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

Word pictures.  I like them.  I am a visual person.  If you really want to get me to remember something, draw a picture using words.  That's what the Psalmist did. When talking about the Law of the Lord, he said the commandments are everlasting and just and represent absolute Truth.  He didn't stop there.  He went on and compared the Word of God to gold and honey.  What is more desired than gold - especially in hard and uncertain times?  The Gold Standard.  Gold is a store of value. What can be sweeter than Honey?  Sugar, you say?  Nope.  Honey is twice as sweet as sugar.  If you are substituting honey for sugar in recipes, you use half the amount of honey.

A friend of ours came by the other day and had just robbed some honey from a wild hive in the woods and he shared with us 3 big pieces of honeycomb.  Our friend is a beekeeper and told us stories about bees.  Did you realize that bees are the only insect that makes a product that is edible? The honeycomb was heavy, sticky, and aromatic.  It was dry on the outside, but the bees cap off the cells with beeswax. When you cut into the cells, the honey oozes out.  I cut a chunk off of it to get a closer look:

Honeycomb

You can pop the whole thing in your mouth and chew it up.  It is waxy, because of the beeswax, but it is edible, but you can do other things with it as well.  For instance, we put each a chunk of honeycomb in our coffee cups on Sunday afternoon to sweeten our coffee.

A little cream and sugar HONEY!

Upon pouring the hot coffee in the cups, the honey immediately dissolves.  What remained on top of the coffee was a swirling mass of stuff that didn't look appetizing.  It wouldn't hurt you to consume it, as it was merely beeswax, but it was just weird to have something floating in your coffee so I skimmed it out.

Beeswax

The coffee, of course, sweetened by honey, was delicious and satisfying.  We don't use much refined sugar at all and substitute honey, so we didn't notice much difference in the taste of our coffee, but...

Waxy cups - a mess to clean

When we were finished with our coffee and the cups cooled, there was a coating of wax all over the inside of the cup that proved to be quite difficult to clean.  Tricia scrubbed and scrubbed and used very hot water to finally remove all the beeswax from the cup.  Since honeycomb used to sweeten coffee resulted in too much work, we won't do this again.  Instead, in the next few days, we'll show you what we did with the rest of it.