How to extract raw honey from honeycomb

honeyhoneycombraw

We recently had to get a swarm of bees removed from our house and moved to an appropriate lodging. We have been left with about 2kg of honeycomb – some of it clean, some of it with old honey/larvae/debris in it.

How do you extract the honey with the following restrictions:

  • No heating, the honey must remain raw
  • All items need to be common household items
  • End product needs to be filtered and clean of any debris or bee leftovers

Best Answer

Ok so this is what I did, and it worked :)

  1. Gently cut/scrape the outer caps with knife
  2. Mashed the comb with a fork and moved it into a fine sieve, placed over a bowl
  3. Put it in the oven on a very low heat <35 degrees Celsius for 30 min

This happened over 2 days, I would gently warm it, then mash it a little and move it around so that it kept seeping out. It's not 100% efficient but I would say I probably got 90% yield.

My dogs were very happy to take the leftover mash as "treats"! (as an side note, it's really really good for them).

Thank you @GdH and @EugenePetrov for the input!