Honeycomb on the Go

Whilst walking, minding my own beeswax, I happened upon these.

Honey Press

If you keep bees using a top bar hive like I do, you wind up with plenty of beautiful honey comb. I've come to greatly appreciate the pleasures of eating honey in the comb, but sometimes I also want to extract the honey from the comb and I continue to experiment with different low-tech methods for doing so.

The funky little Sesame Street segment I posted recently showed a nice honey press, but I haven't found anything similar in my web searches for "honey press." However, I did find this page by beekeeper James Satterfield on Making and Using a Honey Press. I think I might try something similar. I wish his photos were a bit larger, but I think you can get the gist from his web page and take it from there.

Let me know if you have other low-tech, low-cost ideas for pressing honey from the comb, or if you have leads about where to find a honey press like the one in the Sesame Street video.

Bee Shapes

1. Wild beehive sky, 2. Grave of Daniel Becker, 3. Erotic, 4. Six Edges and Six Vertices


Hats off to Julie at Eluvium for the how-to.

Honey Tasting!

Wren and I had the profound pleasure of hosting a honey-tasting event for our Brooklyn Beekeepers Meetup on Sunday.

Along with marvelous company from beekeepers and honeybee afficionados, the afternoon provided a sensory festival of textures and flavors for the palate, plus a spectrum of colors on which to feast the eye (we're talkin' serious eye candy here).The weather cooperated, too, sending personalized beams of sunshine to enrich the glorious visual effect of 20 or 30 different varieties from around the world. I've heard it said that bees harvest the sun, and one can't help but see the truth of this phrase when good light meets good honey.Participants brought honeys from the Nation of Brooklyn, Long Island, Connecticut, and down south—along with a global selection from: Nigeria, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Spain, Italy, England, Australia, and Moldova. We tasted avocado honey, buckwheat honey, fireweed honey, acacia honey, early spring honeys, eucalyptus honey, Japanese knotweed honey, linden honey—and many others.Wren and I provided samplings of our Catskills honeycomb. Matthew made a wonderful treat: macadamian nuts soaked in honey. Our Meetup founder, John, generously provided some lovely mead. We paired the honeys rather freely with various cheeses, including gorgonzola and soft and hard goat cheeses. It was an intoxicating feast. Afterwards, a friend wrote that she felt she had "eaten the whole world today"—it did feel like that. Big fun!

Artisan/Bee

Charming article in the New York Times about this honeycomb vase by a Slovakian product designer named Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny.

See more.

A morsel of honeycomb...

Sencha LOVES honeycomb!