Comb Honey

-Posted by Isaac

Wow, how time does fly in the summer. It's been over two weeks since our last post. Busy busy on the bee farm. The summer honey is just caked in the supers and I'm exhausting myself on these hot afternoons pulling it off the hives, getting it to the honey barn and eventually extracting. The recent rain has been a welcome relief.

I thought I'd show you a little of the comb honey we got into last week. 

These things are called "Ross Rounds." They're a real pain in the butt to produce, but as you can see, the end product is beautiful. I tell other beekeepers that if I had to do it over with comb honey, I'd never go with Ross Rounds. The bees seem to avoid them like the plague, and you just about have to find a hive on the verge of swarming to really force the bees up into the super.

There's something they just don't like about the small round space with a thin sheet of wax foundation.

Alas, the bees eventually cooperate, and draw out some comb. A decent nectar flow definitely helps.

You can see that these supers are not your run-of-the-mill bee boxes. Specialty items like this always incur some expense. That's why we're sticking with the Ross Rounds-- too much money wrapped up in them!

A selling point with the Ross Rounds is that the honey is never touched. The round section comes exactly the way the bees make it. After freezing it for a day to kill any unseen wax moth eggs, we simply pop the section out and put a lid on it.

You can see that they don't all come perfectly capped off. (One on the far left) 

These not-quite-done sections are turned into chunk honey.

A tasty job that Julia just loves.

This cut comb will later be surrounded by beautiful translucent summer honey.

Of course you can find both comb and chunk honey by visiting us at the farmers markets. Please come out and see us on Saturdays! Worthington and the North Market.

Or make the trip down to the farm stand on Randle Rd. It's cheaper in the country.

I mentioned being busy with pulling the summer honey... as an excuse for the recent slack on this blog. I thought this picture might catch your interest. As in, it's not something you see every day. This is what  a thousand pounds of honey looks like in the back of a truck:

Thanks for reading a little about our comb honey production.  If you're curious enough to want to try one, head on over to our Etsy store.

Hopefully by the end of the season we'll have five or six hundred of these sections ready to decorate kitchen tables around central Ohio.