Thursday, August 9, 2012

"Homemade" Honey

My uncle surprised us with some of his honey harvest:  a small ziploc container full of honeycomb!!  Yum.  Except, I had no idea how to get the honey out of the honeycomb.  I've heard of people just eating it whole and spitting out the wax... but I wanted to put it on my toast.  Squeezing worked... sort of.  I resorted to Google to find the answer.

Basically what I found was that I could squeeze the honey out and mush up the honeycomb, then put it all in a strainer (nylons were suggested) and let the honey drip out.  That sounded messy and time consuming.  The second option was to heat the honeycomb and melt the wax.  When everything cools, the wax will be on top, ready to be skimmed off,  and the honey will be on the bottom, ready to be eaten!

  • I melted the honeycomb down in a double boiler.  It only took about 15 minutes over medium heat for the wax to melt.

  • I could pull out the big chunks of wax with a disposable spoon.

  • Then I poured it back into the original container and let it cool completely.

  • When the wax hardened on top of the honey, I scraped the sides with a disposable knife and skimmed the wax off the top.


Ready for eating!!



Now my husband wants to know what fun plan I have for the leftover beeswax... Suggestions?



 

9 comments:

  1. You can make candles with beeswax. It's supposed to be easy. But, if you are brought honey comb again, try this, slice it really thin and put it on you toast like that. We used to always do that and on your toast the beeswax is really soft and you don't notice it.

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  2. I'm with Kendra, make a few candles. What a fun project. Local honey from wherever you happen to live is suppose to be excellent for seasonal allergies. Thanks for visiting my place.

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  3. I agree with making candles. I also seem to recall seeing or hearing about soap made with beeswax.

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  4. Soap would be interesting...

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  5. Good to know about the allergies!!

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  6. Thanks for sharing this unique and excellent post with us at The Becoming Kitchen!

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  7. Make homemade lip balm! Beeswax, coconut and/or olive oils, essential oils, etc.!

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  8. I think candles and soap would both be fun! Or you could use it to wax your thread for hand-sewing, but I don't think you would need that much.

    What a fun project! I wish I had some honeycomb. :)

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  9. I never thought of that!!

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