Can you eat honeycomb?

Put a jar of honeycomb on the table and somebody will always ask the same question before they touch it: do you actually eat the wax?

You do. Here's everything else worth knowing.

The short answer

Honeycomb is entirely edible, wax included. When you bite into a piece, the honey floods out straight away and you're left with a small ball of soft wax. Some people chew it for a while, like gum, and then discard it. Others simply swallow it.

Both are fine. Our bodies can't digest beeswax, so it passes through unchanged. In the amounts you'd eat on toast or from a cheeseboard, that's no cause for concern.

What honeycomb actually is

Honeycomb is built by the bees themselves. Young worker bees produce wax from special glands on the underside of their abdomen. It emerges as tiny, thin flakes, which the bees chew, soften and shape into the familiar six-sided cells.

Those cells do several jobs. The colony uses them to store honey and pollen and to raise young bees. When the honey in a cell is ripe, meaning the bees have reduced its water content enough, they seal the cell with a thin cap of fresh wax. A frame of capped comb is a frame of finished honey, packed and sealed by the bees.

The hexagon isn't an accident. Mathematicians long suspected that a grid of hexagons was the most efficient way to divide a flat surface into equal cells using the least material around the edges. The mathematician Thomas Hales proved it in 1999. Bees had been working to the same answer for millions of years.

Making wax is hard work for a colony, and the bees have to eat a considerable amount of honey to produce it. That's part of why comb honey has always been a treat rather than an everyday food.

What does honeycomb taste like?

Most honey is spun out of the comb in a centrifuge, strained and then settled before it's put into jars. The comb in a jar of chunk honey skips all of that. It has never been extracted or strained, and the honey inside is still sealed in the cells where the bees left it.

The result is a fresher, more immediate aroma and a texture you don't get from any other honey. The wax itself is soft and slightly chewy, with a very mild, faintly waxy taste of its own. The honey carries the flavour.

Chunk honey, cut comb and comb honey: what's the difference?

The names can be confusing, so here's how they're generally used in beekeeping.

• Comb honey usually means a whole section of comb exactly as the bees built it, often sold in a small frame or box.
• Cut comb is a block cut from a frame and packed on its own, without any liquid honey around it.
• Chunk honey, sometimes called cut comb in jar, is a piece of comb placed in a jar and surrounded with liquid honey.

Our Organic Blossom Honey with Honeycomb is chunk honey. Each jar holds roughly 120 to 150 g of comb, cut by hand from full frames, in liquid organic blossom honey. Because every piece is cut by hand, no two are quite the same size or shape.

How to serve honeycomb

On a cheeseboard. This is where honeycomb is at its best. Put the jar out with a knife and let people cut their own piece. The sweet honey and chewy wax work especially well against salty or strong cheeses: a good blue, a mature manchego or a washed-rind cheese.

On hot buttered toast. Thick sourdough, plenty of salted butter, and a slice of comb on top while the toast is still hot. The butter and honey run together as the warmth from the toast softens the comb.

On oatcakes and crackers. With or without cheese.

On a breakfast board. With thick Greek yoghurt and fresh berries, or alongside figs and prosciutto.

A few tips make it easier:

• Use a knife, not a spoon. Cut a wedge rather than trying to scoop. A spoon just squashes the cells.
• Serve it at room temperature. When it's too cold, the honey around the comb thickens and won't flow properly.
• Slice it on a board. Honeycomb leaks as soon as it's cut, which is rather the point, so give it somewhere to go.

Can you cook with honeycomb?

Not really, and there's little reason to. Heat melts the wax and collapses the cells, so by the time it comes out of the oven you've lost everything that made it worth buying. If a recipe calls for honey, use a liquid honey such as Organic Wildflower Honey instead.

Honeycomb comes into its own as a finishing touch, added once the cooking is done:

• a small piece on top of warm pancakes or waffles, just before serving
• a wedge alongside a slice of plain cake or a scoop of vanilla ice cream
• broken over a bowl of porridge once it's in the bowl, not while it's in the pan

In each case the warmth of the food softens the edges of the comb without melting it, and the honey runs out as you eat.

How to store honeycomb

Keep the jar at room temperature with the lid on. The fridge makes the comb firm and the honey stiff, and there's no food safety reason to refrigerate honey.

Don't warm the jar either. Beeswax softens at fairly low temperatures, and heat will slump the comb.

Over time, the liquid honey around the comb may crystallise. That's completely normal for honey. With most jars you'd stand them in warm water to make them runny again, but with honeycomb it's better to leave the set honey as it is and cut through it with a knife. For more on why honey sets and how to slow it down, see why honey goes solid.

Is honeycomb suitable for everyone?

Babies under 12 months. No. The NHS advises that honey in any form should not be given to babies under one year old, and that includes honeycomb.

People with an allergy to bee products. Comb can contain small traces of pollen and propolis, the resin bees use to seal their hives. If you've ever reacted to bee pollen, propolis or other bee products, speak to your GP before trying it.

Vegans. Honeycomb is made by bees and isn't considered vegan.

Where our honeycomb comes from

Our honeycomb comes from a single European producer and from certified organic beekeeping under Regulation (EU) 2018/848. That matters more for comb than for any other honey. When you eat honeycomb, you're eating the wax the bees built as well as the honey they made, so the way the hives are kept ends up on your plate.

The organic rules set out what goes into those hives. The bees' forage within 3 km has to be essentially organic crops or wild vegetation. The hives must be built mainly from natural materials. And colonies must be left enough of their own honey and pollen to get through the winter.

Every batch of the honey is also tested four ways for authenticity, which we explain here.

If you'd rather have your honey without the comb, our guide to choosing a honey takes you through the other four in the range.

Shop Organic Blossom Honey with Honeycomb