Bees Make INCREDIBLE Wild Honey Combs!

Earlier on this year, I showed you that some of my upturned feeders had been left on the colony too long, and my bees had built wild comb upturned within the feeder. I flipped them around the right way and I left them for 3 months. In this video, I'm gonna harvest that honey, cut inside it, and show you what amazing honey the bees have stored. Right, so you can't see me, but you can see the wild honey perfectly formed in this feeder here. Really, really heavy as well. Some of it's draining out, some of it's not fully capped over. I don't care about that though. This is gonna be for my own personal consumption. I'm gonna get in here, give you a close-up, and show you some really beautiful wild honey. Now, the bees have worked so hard over this, and it just goes to show that when you give the bees space to create wild comb, they do it in all different sorts of directions. You can see you've got some of the combs at an angle, some of them that are just going straight across. Warm way, cold way, I don't think the bees really care. What I do know about bees though is if you give them space that's bigger than they create wildcomb like this. You can see down in this corner here, some of the honey was uncapped, so it wasn't at the correct moisture level, so it's coming out of the bottom at the moment. That honey there will ferment, but I don't mind. I'm gonna take out some of the good capped frames, pull them out, give you a real close-up inside them, and show you just how amazing they are. Now believe it or not, the bees did this again, and what I'm amazed about with this one over here is just how wide and chunky some of those frames are. Absolutely unbelievably thick and chunky. And this one here, if you lift it up, is considerably heavier as well. So I'll save this one to the end because this is going to be so super messy. I'll pull out some of the combs now and show you just how cool they are. So where do you start? No idea. I'm gonna make such a mess in my living room, my wife is gonna kill me. But you know, it's already leaking out onto here, so I'm gonna have to get something sorted there because my little daughter's game of Guess Who is in this very box. So So I'll tip it back up on its side, correct it, mop up that bit there, and then we'll take a look. Now when I said I'd mop this bit up, I obviously meant with my fingers. You don't waste good honey on a cloth. But what's very interesting is just mopping it up there, you can taste how light the honey is, and you can feel the viscosity of it in that it's very watery. That tells me that the honey in some of these combs here is probably not actually classed as honey yet because the moisture content isn't correct. So for people that don't know, bees go out, they collect nectar, it's around an 80% water content, Bring it back to the hive, they fan it down and get it down to below around a 20% moisture content. Generally, honey that I get is in between 16% and 18%, and that's how you get it nice and thick and viscous and really strong tasting. Anything higher than that and it's nowhere near as thick and it's nowhere near as strong tasting. Perfectly edible, but doesn't store as well and it will start to ferment. I'm so excited. Right, I'm just gonna start pulling some bits out. Whoa. Okay, that went really, really well. I think that one there might have actually been a little bit broken off. So hopefully you can get a bit of a close-up on that camera there. You can see we've got some that's completely capped over. Just trying to not break it. This bit up here where you see the white cappings, that is capped honey and that will be good. The stuff further down the bottom that looks empty now is where you've just got nectar that isn't the correct moisture content yet. What you can see on that side there is a really cool pattern which shows you exactly how the bees actually store that honey in their comb. What I find so amazing about this as well is this is completely wild. No foundation, no starter strips. I'm not giving the bees any clue how to create this. That is just a perfectly natural wonder of nature. Right, so let's get inside, start chopping up some of this honey. So excited about this. And what I always find with honeycomb is that it cuts so nicely. Get yourself a good sharp knife, obviously, all the time. Giving it a really good taste. What is so amazing about honeycomb is that each and every single apiary— so that is a place where you keep your bees— is going to produce a different honey. Each and every beehive within that apiary is going to produce a very slightly different honey. Each and every frame is going to produce a different honey. And each and every single little cell that you see here is going to have its own bespoke mix of different nectars. This piece over here will taste very different from this piece over here, or they might taste similar, or they might taste completely different. It's just a real lottery, and you never know what you're going to get. The only constant is, you know, it's going to be amazing. So I'm just breaking these up at the moment. Kind of think maybe I'm making like a lot of mess, but I just want to show you what's inside. All of those ones there are perfectly capped, and you can see just how well the bees have stored the honey inside. They cap it over with this capping here in order to protect the honey from fermentation and from any foreign bodies going in there, and it will pretty much keep indefinitely in there as long as the hive keeps it at the correct temperature and there's no pests or anything that go in and break these seals. Pretty much going to last forever. But you just take a look at some of that beautiful honey inside there. You can't get better than playing with honey on camera with a little slow-motion camera. It really is good fun. I'm going to take numerous tastes all the way through. 'Cause I love honey and I love tasting the differences from frame to frame. Right, so you must think I'm crazy. I've just been playing with honey for 15 minutes there. What am I gonna do with all this honey? I'm gonna use a real simple method called a crush and strain method. If you're interested in knowing what that is, definitely hit the subscribe button. I'm gonna do that today as a separate video. Really simple though. I'm gonna put this honey in this sieve and let it come through. Right, the one you've all been waiting for. Let's get the biggest, chunkiest one out of here. Try and not make a horrific amount of mess in my living room. See just how much honey is stored inside. Again, what I love about this one is just how cool all of those wax formations are. Don't care about what angle they're going off at, completely wild, natural comb. But what I really love about this one is just how extended some of those cells are. Absolutely bonkers, full of beautiful Welsh honey. Right, this is gonna be so much fun and probably the messiest thing you've ever seen on YouTube. I'm gonna get my knife and I'm gonna try and chop out the biggest, fattest piece of honey from inside this feeder. Well, that is incredible. I cannot get over just how much honey is in this piece here. So, so heavy. Relatively clean break as well. Got it out without a huge amount of mess, which I'm quite surprised at. Let's open it up now and see how good it is. So I think you'll agree, that's pretty impressive. Definitely I'm impressed anyway. Let's get the knife out and start cutting into it. So what I really love about this one is the extended honeycomb, as you can see there. Bees don't generally do that in the wild, and it's quite strange to see that they've actually done it. The lower side is about average, where you'd expect to see like a standard cell depth, but these ones here, they've been really extended out to give you a massive amount of honey, and that's why these are so, so heavy. So I'll do a couple of other cuts in here. Can't wait to taste this one. My wife is gonna go insane. There is lots of honey on the floor. But don't worry, not gonna sell any of this honey. This is going into jars for me and my wife to eat. We love honey like this, straight out of the hive. So there we go, 100% wild Welsh honeycomb. This one here isn't for sale. If you wanna know how I'm gonna get this into a jar, definitely hit the subscribe button. We're gonna do a crush and strain method to show you how to get wild honeycomb into a jar.