Comb Honey: What It Is and How to Eat It

Comb honey is honey still sealed inside the beeswax comb the bees built for it, cut from the frame and sold as a whole section, a square of cut comb, or a piece suspended in a jar of liquid honey. You eat the wax along with the honey, or chew it and set it aside; both are normal. Because honey in a sealed comb cannot be blended, warmed or filtered without wrecking the comb, it is the least alterable form honey comes in.

One ambiguity first. In Britain “honeycomb” also names cinder toffee, the crisp aerated sweet sold as hokey pokey. That is boiled sugar; this guide is about the other honeycomb, the wax structure from a hive.

Comb honey is honey left in the wax cells the bees stored it in, sealed under a wax capping and sold that way rather than spun out into a jar.

Plate I · IllustrationRecord

What is honeycomb made of?

Two things: beeswax, and the honey inside it.

The bees make the wax themselves. According to the FAO, young workers secrete it as small platelets from eight wax glands on the underside of the abdomen, then work those platelets into cells. Beeswax is a mixture, not one substance — around 35 per cent monoesters, 14 per cent hydrocarbons, 14 per cent diesters, 12 per cent free acids and 8 per cent hydroxy polyesters, with at least 284 compounds recorded in pure Apis mellifera wax. It melts at about 62 to 65 degrees Celsius.

The structural figure is worth carrying: the FAO describes roughly 20 g of comb holding 1,000 g of honey — fifty times its own weight, in a sheet a thumbnail can break.

Inside the capped cells is honey as the bees left it: nothing added, nothing taken out. An average honey runs to about 17 per cent water, 38 per cent fructose, 31 per cent glucose and 1 per cent sucrose.

Why are the cells hexagonal?

Because of how they are built, not because the bees set out to draw hexagons. Cells begin circular. As Nazzi put it in Scientific Reports, cells “are not hexagonal when they are built but rather circular” — visible in any comb caught early in construction. How the circle becomes a hexagon is not settled. One account has surface tension moulding the soft wax as three walls converge at a junction, settling into 120-degree angles. Another, from Bauer and Bienefeld, has the bees shaping the cells mechanically, on the grounds that bees “do not heat up wax to the temperatures needed for the wax to reach the liquid equilibrium”. Nazzi’s own conclusion is that “the formation of the hexagons is still a matter of debate and a definitive conclusion has not yet been reached”.

The spacing is regular enough to measure: in control combs built without geometric obstruction, a 2022 study in PNAS found cell centres about 5.4 mm apart.

Fig. I · One cell, drawn twiceDiagram

One · as built

Circular

Two · as finished

Hexagonal

How the nectar reaches those cells is a separate story — see how bees make honey.

What is comb honey sold as?

Three forms, and UK law names all three. The Honey (England) Regulations 2015 define comb honey as “honey stored by bees in the cells of freshly built broodless combs or thin comb foundation sheets made solely of beeswax and sold in sealed whole combs or sections of such combs”.

• Sections — a whole sealed comb built inside a frame or ring and sold intact.
• Cut comb — squares cut from a shallow sealed comb, drained and boxed.
• Chunk honey — a piece of comb dropped into a jar and topped up with liquid honey.

Sections and dry cut comb are both “comb honey” in law — the definition covers “sealed whole combs or sections of such combs”. Once a piece of comb sits in liquid honey it takes a different legal name: “chunk honey and cut comb in honey”, defined as “honeys which contain one or more pieces of comb honey”.

Can you eat honeycomb, wax and all?

Yes. Beeswax is an authorised food additive in Great Britain — E901, beeswax, white and yellow, on the Food Standards Agency register — used elsewhere as a glazing agent.

What happens in the mouth is physics. The honey goes first, released in the first few chews. The wax does not follow: it melts at around 62 to 65 degrees Celsius, far above mouth temperature, so rather than dissolving it warms into a pliable lump and stays a lump. From there people divide — some swallow it, some park it on the side of the plate. Neither is wrong, and the honey is the same either way.

Is comb honey different from honey in a jar?

Not in substance. It is the same honey; the difference is everything that has not happened to it. Extracted honey — the Regulations’ term for “honey obtained by centrifuging de-capped broodless combs”, and nearly every jar on a UK shelf — is spun out, and may then be warmed and filtered. Comb honey has had none of that, because none of it can be done while the comb is intact. Our guide to what raw honey is covers what those steps change.

Is honeycomb just sugar?

Sugar and wax, in that order. Inside the capped cells the honey averages about 17 per cent water, 38 per cent fructose, 31 per cent glucose and 1 per cent sucrose — those simple sugars are most of what is there. The beeswax around them is not a sugar at all, and it does not dissolve in the mouth.

On sugars the position is identical to a jar. The NHS counts the sugars in honey as free sugars — the category that also covers sugar added to food and sugars in syrups, nectars and unsweetened fruit juice — and advises adults have no more than 30 g of free sugars a day, which it puts at roughly seven sugar cubes. Comb honey is honey; the wax does not alter that.

That is composition and national dietary guidance. One limit is absolute rather than a question of amount: honey is not for infants under 12 months, set out under who should not eat comb honey, below.

How do you cut and serve honeycomb?

Warm a knife under a hot tap and dry it: a warm blade parts the wax cleanly, a cold one drags and tears the cells. Cut small squares, and only what you are putting out — comb keeps better whole.

• With cheese. Comb beside something salty is the strongest pairing there is; in Greece it is a fixture of the table, set out in honey and cheese.
• On toast. Lay a square on hot toast and let it sit. The wax softens and the honey runs; what is left is chewable rather than spreadable.
• On a board. Comb, bread, cheese, a spoon — brought out early, because comb cuts and eats better at room temperature.

Fig. II · The three forms, and their legal namesDiagram

Three forms, and UK law names all three

Sections

A whole sealed comb built inside a frame or ring and sold intact.

In lawComb honey

Cut comb

Squares cut from a shallow sealed comb, drained and boxed.

In lawComb honey

Chunk honey

A piece of comb dropped into a jar and topped up with liquid honey.

In lawChunk honey and cut comb in honey

Sections and dry cut comb are both comb honey in law. Once a piece of comb sits in liquid honey it takes a different legal name.

Comb honey — The Honey (England) Regulations 2015

“honey stored by bees in the cells of freshly built broodless combs or thin comb foundation sheets made solely of beeswax and sold in sealed whole combs or sections of such combs”

Chunk honey and cut comb in honey — the same Regulations

“honeys which contain one or more pieces of comb honey”

Why is comb honey hard to fake?

Because adulteration is done to liquid honey, and the comb will not sit still for it. Syrup cannot be blended into a sealed cell. The comb cannot be warmed without softening towards its melting point. Pollen cannot be filtered out without first taking the honey out of the comb — and honey with pollen significantly removed must be sold as filtered honey, a separate legal name. A sealed comb is its own processing statement.

Two limits, plainly. The comb speaks for what happened after the hive, not for what the bees foraged on or were given; and on its own it says nothing about geographical origin. For the checks that do address those, see how to tell if honey is real.

How long does comb honey last, and how should you store it?

Sealed, cool and dry, away from strong smells. Honey draws moisture out of the air — the FAO notes that a honey at 18.3 per cent water or less takes up moisture from air above 60 per cent relative humidity — and only honey below about 18 per cent water stores with little risk of fermenting. So the box or jar stays closed between servings.

Temperature does the rest. Above 25 degrees Celsius most honeys stay liquid but lose aroma within months. Crystallisation (spelled “crystallized” by plenty of UK searchers) is fastest around 14 degrees Celsius and effectively stops above 25 or below 5, which is why comb turns granular in an ordinary cupboard — texture, not spoilage. The difference from a jar is that you cannot gently re-liquefy comb without deforming the wax. See crystallised honey and whether honey goes off.

Who should not eat comb honey?

Honey of any kind, comb included, is not suitable for infants under 12 months. NHS advice is not to give a child honey until they are over one year old, because honey occasionally contains bacteria that can produce toxins in a baby’s intestines, leading to infant botulism, a very serious illness.

Bee products are also allergens for some people; comb honey carries wax as well as honey.

Where THYMELIA stands

THYMELIA is a UK house of Greek foods working two harvests — raw thyme honey from Chania in western Crete, and early-harvest olive oil from the hills above Kalamata. Comb honey matters to us as a category for the reason above: handling cannot be hidden in it, which is the standard we want applied to everything in a jar. There is no shop yet. Not every product in the range will be raw, and where one is not we will say so.

How we choose producers is at sourcing; what we will test and publish per batch is at testing; what the research on bee products has actually found is at evidence. The category from the top is at raw honey.