Adventures in making Mead

My parents have bees. Its my dad's army of 30,000 (or 50,000 depending on the season).

After extracting honey from the combs using a centrifuge (or gravity + time) there is still a lot of honey clinging onto the inside of the comb. Honey is so viscous its hard to remove it from the wax. My dad decided he was going to make mead from this honey which would probably get wasted otherwise.

We heated the comb in some water on the stove to melt it.

its kind of a disgusting mess of wax and bee parts.

After cooling in the bathtub we removed the now solid wax and bee parts from the liquid.


My dad tested the sugar content of the mixture with his hydrometer (left over from his beer making days) and determined that there was more than enough sugar for the yeast to eat.




yeast and yeast nutrition for mead


getting ready to shake


all situated for fermentation. My dad plans to add grain alcohol and maybe more honey later on. The mead looks relatively vile and is still going to need some filtering but we havent figured that part out yet. It is really just a test batch to see how the process works as there is SO much more honey where this came from...