Honey Comb
Honey comb is a very unique and sweet food product made by honey bees. Both the hexagonal wax structure and the honey stored inside the structure are made by the bees by processing nectar which they collect from flowers.
If you’re looking for an all natural raw honey, honey comb is the best form to purchase. Because beeswax melts at about 143 degrees, honey comb with its original structure intact cannot have been pasteurized.
Honey Comb Varieties
When a piece of honey comb is cut out of a frame of honey, it is called “cut comb”. When sold that way, the weight is typically variable, and the upper display surface should remain dry, with clean wax displayed, as it is when it was hanging in the frame in the hive.
Cut comb in a box is the best product for those of a purist or nostalgic mindset. Because the honey is still encapsulated in the beeswax cells, it cannot have been adulterated by humans after the bees capped the cells. And honey still in wax is the historical way that people stored honey before the development of modern extraction equipment and squeeze bottles. Cut comb is also the best form of honey for educational purposes, in that it is quite literally a piece of what the bees made, in its original form, with the outer surfaces still intact.
Because its form is different from how honey is typically sold in stores these days, sometimes people are unsure how to actually eat it. The wax is actually quite fragile. The bees only make it strong enough to hold together for a while in the hive, and it is paper thin. Yet the wax provides structure to hold the honey in its shape. So you can literally stick a fork in it, and eat it as you would a piece of pie, for an energy boosting snack.
Alternatively, you can spread it on bread or similar products, with a knife, and the wax will break into small pieces that are often not even noticeable if you are eating a firm bread.
And these days, we have to mention, ASMR honeycomb is a thing.
When random smaller “chunks” of honey that were perhaps broken off, or of undesirable geometry, are placed in a jar and filled to the top of the jar with liquid honey, the hybrid product is called “chunk honey”. Unlike cut comb, chunk honey is of uniform weight because the container is topped off before closure.
Chunk honey is a better choice than cut comb for shipping or traveling. Jars often seal better than cut comb containers. And if the container were to tip over, the appearance of chunk honey does not change because it is already filled with liquid, whereas comb changes its appearance if honey makes its way onto the upper wax surface.
Chunk honey is classy and beautiful, set in a glass jar, and is better packaging for travel or shipping than cut comb.