How to Eat Honeycomb

Comb honey is usually sold in small 1/2- to 1 lb.-blocks in a special plastic container or immersed in a large jar of extracted honey. Comb honey is the purest kind of honey, still sealed in the wax by the bees themselves, totally raw and never touched by human hands.

Eating comb honey is a real joy that few people have had the opportunity to try. The comb can be eaten as is or the honey can easily be removed from the comb. The procedure is fun, slightly sticky, and very tasty.

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Honeycomb

Large shallow bowl

Large spoon

Strainer

Fork

Jar

Eating Comb Honey

1 Cut a bite-sized piece of honeycomb from the block. Pop it in your mouth and chew it like chewing gum. This will release all of the honey. You can eat the wax if you like, or remove it once the honey is gone.

2 To extract the honey, place a portion of the honeycomb on its edge in a shallow bowl that is large enough to hold any honey released.

3 Crush the honey comb gently with the back of a large spoon. Press the wax in the comb down repeatedly so that it wads up in the bottom of the bowl. As the wax is pressed, each cell in the comb will break open, releasing the honey into the bowl.

4 Lift the wax from the bowl with a fork once all of the honey is extracted. Place a strainer over the bowl and put the wax in it to allow it to drain.

5 Remove the strainer and discard the wax, or rinse it off and store it for future projects such as candle making. Use the fork to remove any remaining bits of wax from the honey. Use the honey immediately or store it in a jar for later.

Sources

http://www.ehow.com/how_5618626_eat-honeycomb.html

Is Honeycomb Edible ?

A honeycomb is the amazing structure that bees build with honey. It can also be called beeswax and it is edible. Some people consider it a delicacy to eat the honeycomb, since it could be called extra-concentrated honey. It takes about 16 grams of honey to produce a gram of the waxy structure that makes up the honeycomb. Others eat honeycomb of specific types in the hope that it will reduce seasonal allergies. There’s very little evidence to support that this works, but it may be the tastiest remedy for allergies.

When beekeepers harvest honey, they remove sections of the comb and place it in a centrifuge machine to remove the liquid honey that drips from each hexagon in the comb. Some people object to this, and it’s virtually impossible to make cruelty free honey. A few bees do get stuck in the comb sections and are killed during this process. Vegans may abstain from eating honey products for this reason. It’s extremely important to keep the bee population up in order to sustain an active hive, so while there may be a few bees that inadvertently get into the comb when it’s processed, beekeepers do try to keep this to a minimum.

Scientists and just about anyone who’s looked at a honeycomb absolutely marvel at its structure. Typically, each piece of the comb is hexagonal (six-sided), with a precise 120-degree angle for each side. This can bend a bit when the comb is cut or processed, but the pattern is almost identical between one hexagon and the next. People are amazed at the precision with which bees build each section of the comb, but the size is important for the bees. They store food there, excrete honey into the comb and use each comb to raise young bees. Precision in architecture is likely involved in survival of the bee population.

You can find honeycomb at natural foods stores, some specialty markets, and sometimes at local farmer’s markets. It’s definitely worth trying. As a food for people, honeycomb doesn’t have a lot of practical applications, though honey certainly is an excellent sweetener. Other animals, particularly brown and black bears do consume honeycomb when they can get it. Although to take it as bears do, straight from the hive, is not suggested for people who are not in appropriate safety clothing. As many know, bees are not very forgiving.

Sources
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-honeycomb.htm

What does a Honeycomb look like ?

How is Honeycomb structured ?

The axes of honeycomb cells are always quasi-horizontal, and the non-angled rows of honeycomb cells are always horizontally (not vertically) aligned. Thus, each cell has two vertical walls, with "floors" and "ceilings" composed of two angled walls. The cells slope slightly upwards, between 9 and 14 degrees, towards the open ends.

There are two possible explanations for the reason that honeycomb is composed of hexagons, rather than any other shape. One, given by Jan Brożek, is that the hexagon tiles the plane with minimal surface area. Thus a hexagonal structure uses the least material to create a lattice of cells within a given volume. Another, given by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, is that the shape simply results from the process of individual bees putting cells together: somewhat analogous to the boundary shapes created in a field of soap bubbles. In support of this he notes that queen cells, which are constructed singly, are irregular and lumpy with no apparent attempt at efficiency.

The closed ends of the honeycomb cells are also an example of geometric efficiency, albeit three-dimensional and little-noticed. The ends are trihedral (i.e., composed of three planes) sections of rhombic dodecahedra, with the dihedral angles of all adjacent surfaces measuring 120°, the angle that minimizes surface area for a given volume. (The angle formed by the edges at the pyramidal apex is approximately 109° 28' 16" (= 180° - arccos(1/3)).)

The shape of the cells is such that two opposing honeycomb layers nest into each other, with each facet of the closed ends being shared by opposing cells.

Individual cells do not, of course, show this geometric perfection: in a regular comb, there are deviations of a few percent from the "perfect" hexagonal shape. In transition zones between the larger cells of drone comb and the smaller cells of worker comb, or when the bees encounter obstacles, the shapes are often distorted.In 1965, László Fejes Tóth discovered that the trihedral pyramidal shape (which is composed of three rhombi) used by the honeybee is not the theoretically optimal three-dimensional geometry. A cell end composed of two hexagons and two smaller rhombuses would actually be .035% (or approximately 1 part per 2850) more efficient. This difference is too minute to measure on an actual honeycomb, and irrelevant to the hive economy in terms of efficient use of wax, considering that wild comb varies considerably from any mathematical notion of "ideal" geometry.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb

What is a Honeycomb ?

A honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal wax cells built byhoney bees in their nests to contain their larvae and stores of honey and pollen.

Beekeepers may remove the entire honeycomb to harvesthoney. Honey bees consume about 8.4 pounds of honey to secrete one pound of wax, so it makes economic sense to return the wax to the hive after harvesting the honey, commonly called "pulling honey" or "robbing the bees" by beekeepers.

The structure of the comb may be left basically intact when honey is extracted from it by uncapping and spinning in a centrifugal machine—thehoney extractor. Fresh, new comb is sometimes sold and used intact as comb honey, especially if the honey is being spread on bread rather than used in cooking or to sweeten tea.

Broodcomb becomes dark over time, because of the cocoons embedded in the cells and the tracking of many feet, called travel stain by beekeepers when seen on frames of comb honey. Honeycomb in the "supers" that are not allowed to be used for brood (e.g. by the placement of aqueen excluder) stays light coloured.

Numerous wasps, especially polistinae and vespinae, construct hexagonal prism packed combs made of paper instead of wax; and in some species (like Brachygastra mellifica), honey is stored in the nest, thus technically forming a paper honeycomb. However, the term "honeycomb" is not often used for such structures.

Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb