Honeybee-Honey Question ??

Well I purchased a 3 lb. box of honeybees last Spring. They had a good year. I got a super of comb honey off of them.
The comb honey is starting to sugar. I did eat it as fast as I could. I am heating a dozen boxes in a kettle today.
I plan on letting it set over night to cool and then take the wax off and bottle the honey. Is there another way, maybe
a better way to get the honey out of the wax?? Thanks for the help, BS

Well heating the comb and then letting it cool worked fine. I let the wax set up and removed it while it was still warm.
This will be much better honey than that China stuff the stores sell. Maybe I need two hives..Ha. And away we go...

I guess that maybe I don't completly understand what it is that you are trying to do. I think that you are trying to extract honey out of your comb. You will need an extractor to do that because you do not want to waste your honeycomb by heating it up. It takes a lot of resources for your bees to make new comb and they only draw comb out during a nectar flow. The granulation in your honey comes from either sugar water or high consentrations of clover which can be made to go away by WARMING the honey up and not boiling it or overheating it.

Does this picture help?? A very hot knife and barely scrape the top of the comb to expose the honey and let it drip into a large pot . You can buy an electric hot knife or rotate two knives coming out of boiling water until you are done.

There are better ways if you have the equipment. I recommend joining a local beekeeping association and make a few beekeeper friends. My beekeeping club makes an extractor available to its newest members.

Fred, I understand him to mean comb honey. Meaning ross rounds, section honey or whole frame. Definitely old school the only ways I know to keep section honey liquid is start with honey that is slow to candy and store it at ninety degrees.

Yes warrior, cut comb honey. I have no equipment. I harvested one shallow supper of honey, cut the comb out and cut each into 4 squares and put them into
plastic boxes. No bee club in this area. I read a lot and run a lot of you tube bee keeping short films. We have birds foot trefoil, sp?, flower in this area.
It did turn out real nice.

If your cutting the comb from the frame then just do a crush and strain, I did it that way for years. Take you a new pair of clean knee high panty hose and as you cut the comb from the frames fill the knee highs and squeeze, then let it hang in a warm room and drain.

The key to not having your honey candy is to never let it get chilled or refridgerate it. Of course some honeys (goldenrod and aster) will granulate rapidly irregardless but honey is best filtered and stored warm.

What warrior said. If you have only a few hives and can' barrow/rent an extractor then crush & strain is the way to go. If you heat your honey over 120 deg. then it ain't much better than store bought except you do know its real honey. Jim

You could give it back to the bees and let them make it into honey that is not crystalized. Panty hose and a bucket and a place where the bees can't find you is your other option.

If you are interested in cut-comb the easy way, you could cut a hive sized piece of plywood set as many jars on it as you can fit and mark them and drill holes in the center of the jars. Set an empty super over the jars setting upside down over the holes. Melt some wax in the bottom of the jars so they have a place to start. when they fill up a jar you just take it out and put a lid on it. This works about as hit and miss as potato barrels, and other such "lazy mans" ways of doing things. It is easy, but if you bump one of the jars off of the hole it turns into a large mess.

Wow, Andy, that's an oldie right there. I had that exact method explained to me over thirty years ago by the older gentleman that got me into bees. His father kept them in "gums" or sections of hollow logs and that was one of the ways they got there honey. Not too long ago I was reading a history of beekeeping in England and back in the early 1800s beeks had special hives the took bell jars as supers.

There is a you tube vid. that shows how that is done with jars,Its posted by Fatbeeman. Pretty cool.

The USDA outlawed gums in the 30's or 40's, foulbrood epidemic, story goes that grandpa was not real happy about that. That would be pretty lazy, hollow log and a couple of planks. I've had the pleasure of talking to some old timers who didn't keep bees at all, they hunted them. Each of them swore the other ones didn't know how to do it. One caught bees and put them in a jar, one used bait, and what I found interesting was the one that carried some flour. When he found a bee on a flower he would flick flour on it with a headed out piece of grass and it would leave a trail like shooting tracers. His idea was that a bee didn't know how full it was, just how heavy it was, the weight of the flour told it it was time to go home. When the flour blew off it would go back to a flower.

I've tried some of their techniques and I always end up in somebodies yard.

For us slow people, the honey from fishers and other name brands is from China??

Buy it from a local beekeeper not in a grocery store. Its pure and 100% American !!

I can't speak to brands but yes most of the consumer honey sold retail on store shelves is imported. There are several problems with this, aside from the obvious damage to US beekeepers, such as adultered product and dangerous chemicals found in the honey. Here in the US the medications we use to treat our bees or the pesticides used against mites and beetles are regulated more so than in other countries and as a result imports from some countries, particularly China, have been banned due to harmful antibiotics and pesticides being found in the honey. This has led to "dumping" and fraudulent transhipping by foreign countries where bulk honey is shipped from China to a third party nation then re labeled as to country of origin then shipped here. Another ploy is due to the fact that the USDA does not have a legal definition for honey. This deceitful trick is to ship it to the US as syrup or something else and then the importer repackages and relabels, some have even been known to to blend cheaper corn or rice syrups and sell it as honey.
This is not to say all honey on store shelves is tainted but it seems that every other month I read of another importer getting raided and slapped with huge fines, sadly though very few convictions. Business as usual I guess.

Even outside of all this the ultra processed honey in pure form isn't the best for you. Bulk processors do two things to facilitate bottling and prolong shelf life, heat and ultrafilter. This is not to be confused with pasteurization as honey does not need pasteurization. The reason for heating to 140+ is twofold, first to make the naturally thick honey flow easier though the pumps used in mass bottling and to enable it to be microfiltered. The heating melts any sugar crystals present in the honey that would serve as a catalyst for granulation and the filtering removes particulates such as naturally occurring pollen grains which may serve as templates for crystallization and may cause dark or cloudy honey. This is all well and good in that it allows the mass production of a pretty product that will last on store shelves.
The downside is that any honey that has been heated above 120 has had it's delicate and beneficial esters and enzymes destroyed.