Can you eat honeycomb?

What you are eating

Worker bees between roughly twelve and eighteen days old secrete wax as small translucent flakes from glands under the abdomen, chew them warm, and build them into hexagonal cells. They fill those cells with ripened honey and cap them once the moisture has fallen far enough for it to keep. A capped comb is effectively bee-certified: they do not seal honey that is still too wet.

How to eat it

• Cut it into squares with a warm knife, and serve at room temperature — cold comb is hard and waxy, warm comb releases honey as you bite.
• On a cheese board it does something no liquid honey can, because the texture contrast is the point.
• On hot buttered toast the wax softens and the honey runs. This is the classic British way to eat it.
• Do not stir it into a hot drink. You will get honey and a wax slick.

Why it is worth buying once

Comb honey cannot be blended, filtered, pasteurised or easily faked — the wax structure has to have come out of a hive intact. In a category with a serious and well-documented fraud problem, that is worth something on its own. It is also the only way to taste a flow exactly as the colony made it, with none of a packer's decisions in between.