Every year we like to try some new things with our bees and honey. One of the things we tried this year is a single ‘super’ with Hogg Halfcomb cassettes in it. Let me try to break down what this is. A honey ‘super’ is a box for the bees to store honey that we can harvest. Comb honey is an often sought-after type of honey that comes right in the honeycomb (not extracted from the comb). Comb honey is as close to the natural product as you can get, especially, when it is warm and fresh. People have devised several different ways to have the bees draw out comb on a natural beeswax foundation so that it can be harvested and sectioned right from the super.

The Hogg Halfcomb system is a unique system that caught my eye. We purchased the box of halfcomb cassettes that is the top box shown in the picture below. I had just placed it on the top of the hive stack.

Here is a better top view right after placing it on the hive. There are 40 square, clear-plastic cassettes in the super. On one side of each cassette is a thin beeswax foundation for the bees to “draw” honeycomb upon. You can see the bees from the box below through the transparent cassettes. I’m hoping they will start exploring this box and making honeycomb in the July nectar flow.

It’s not easy to coax the bees to draw wax in these cassettes, so you have to put the box on when there is a lot of nectar available and you have to make sure their hive is crowded so that they don’t have much extra space to store nectar in a different box. But you don’t want it too crowded so that they leave their hive or swarm in search of a a new, larger home. I did this by removing regular honey supers of the hive so that the bees had to start spreading out in this comb honey super. We had decent success with this as they did create comb and store honey in the majority of the cassettes. Here is the super after taking it off the hive some weeks later.

What you end up with are amazing, unique creations in each cassette:

Sometimes, they build the come is a perfect way, all facing the same direction. Sometimes they anchor the comb to the bottom of the next cassette so that it hangs perpendicular to rest of the comb. They may cap the honey in certain patterns, sometimes leaving a few cells uncapped so you can see the fresh honey within. You can also see it from the sides of some cassettes. Except where I had to cut the comb off of an adjacent cassette, this is not “cut-comb” honey because I’m not cutting it off of a frame and placing the pieces in these cassettes. The comb is built right in the cassettes for you to admire 🙂

Besides having these on your shelf to look at, you might not be aware of how to enjoy this delicacy. After a little research, one common way this is enjoyed is on a hot biscuit or English muffin. Just spread it on while hot and the wax will melt and mix with the warm honey, infusing it with a rich aroma – an almost buttery experience. You need to eat it immediately, and it is perfectly safe to consume the wax. You actually won’t taste/feel the wax at all if you eat comb like this. But if you can always just eat a chunk of the honeycomb straight and spit out the wax later after giving it a good chew. Yum!!

You can order it from our website just like the rest of our products:

Untouched comb honey 8.5-10 oz

Untouched comb honey 7-8.5 oz

Because of the nature of this product and the extra expenses that go into it, it’s certainly going to cost more than extracted liquid honey. But for those of you who might be an experienced consumer or those who are up for trying out this novelty, we believe it will be worth it! Limited supply – these might go fast.