*A Simple Way To Processes Honey*
By: John1lt
29 September 2024

A conversation with a coworker brought about this article. Several years ago my coworkers relative found a wild bee colony and robbed the honey. Not knowing how to extract the honey from the wax comb they crushed the comb and filtered out the wax by using a large kitchen sieve. He said it took a long time but the honey was some of the best they ever had.

Some times I have knowledge that I think everyone knows. In my teens and early twenties I worked for multiple commercial beekeepers, mostly extracting honey from the wax comb. The equipment to extract honey can be complex and expensive. Commercial and hobbyist beekeepers use centrifuges to extract the honey leaving the wax combs intact to put back in the hive for the bees to reuse. If I remember correctly it takes about 8 pounds of honey to make a pound of bees wax so it makes economic sense to use a system that saves the honey comb for reuse by the bees.

I explained to my coworker that they needn't have gone thru all the trouble of "filtering" the honey through a sieve. All they really needed to do was crush the comb into a suitable container and the wax would simply float to the top and be scraped off later. Honey is very dense and the impurities float to the top. For comparison water weighs approximately 8 pounds per gallon; honey weighs approximately 12 pounds per gallon. Commercial beekeepers will allow their honey to sit for several hours or even days in a large tank to allow any wax particles to float to the top and scrapped off before placing the honey in 55 gallon drums to be shipped to the bottler.

Another way to extract the honey from the comb would be to place the honey comb in a cooking pot and gently heat it until the wax melts. After the wax melts remove the pot from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature. The wax will solidify into a block on top that can be removed and the honey can be poured into a storage container.

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