What Is Creamed Honey? Notes From a Nebraska Honey Harvest

The Pantry Pulse, 8 October 2026.

Bee Bum, a honey farm outside Beatrice, Nebraska, holds its first Honey Harvest Festival this Saturday, with vendor booths, a pumpkin patch and the farm's own honey store open to visitors. One of the farm's specialties is creamed honey, the smooth, spreadable form of honey, which Bee Bum also makes in chocolate, cinnamon and peanut butter flavors. That texture goes back to a patent issued in 1935, and its numbers scale down to a single jar.

What Is Happening in Beatrice

The festival runs on Saturday, 10 October, at Bee Bum's farm and the Korner Pumpkin Patch at 6696 East Highway 136, and the event listing gives admission as free. The listing promises vendor booths of handmade goods and specialty foods, with food and drinks sold through the day. This week the Beatrice Daily Sun published photographs by Christina Lyons of the farm getting ready. The captions note that the farm store sells all of Bee Bum's honey products and stays open all year, and that the honey processing equipment has moved into its own renovated building, separate from the store.

The Farm Behind the Festival

Kevin and Julie Monfelt founded Bee Bum in 2014, and the farm says it started as a hobby before it grew into a business. According to KOLN, a Lincoln television station, the Monfelts first kept bees while living in Adams, then moved the operation to the acreage where Julie's grandparents once lived. The family ran the pumpkin patch there for more than 20 years. The bees gave the farm its name: on hot days, Kevin Monfelt told the station, honeybees hold their bums in the air.

In May 2024, KOLN reported about 300 colonies four miles east of Beatrice, each with roughly 30,000 bees, and said a portion of the hives goes south for the winter. The two 2024 reports give different harvest figures: KOLN cited about 5,000 pounds a season, and Rural Radio Network reported an expected 6,500 pounds for that year.

KOLN also reported that the farm made about 600 pounds of creamed honey and 300 pounds of infused honey every month, along with hot honey, lip balms and lotion bars. According to KOLN, the farm does not mail creamed honey during the summer, and the station gave no reason.

Where Creamed Honey Comes From

Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution, and over time glucose comes out of it as crystals. Left alone, that is ordinary crystallization, not spoilage, as the honey crystals guide explains. Creamed honey, also sold as whipped, spun or set honey, is honey crystallized under control.

The controlled method has a paper trail. Elton James Dyce of Ithaca, New York, filed a patent application on 26 March 1931, and US Patent 1,987,893 was issued on 15 January 1935, with Cornell University listed as assignee in the patent record. One of its claims sets out the method in five steps. The honey is heated enough to destroy yeasts, then cooled to about 75°F. About 5 percent granulated honey goes in as a starter and is stirred through. The mixture is then held at about 57°F for several days. The patent's description adds that the finished honey keeps at ordinary temperatures without liquefying, though a thin honey may soften in a room warmer than usual.

The method works by giving the honey a starter of fine crystals before it sets, so it does not grow its own coarser ones. Heating clears out the yeasts and melts any existing crystals, cooling lets the starter go in without melting, and the steady cool hold makes the new crystals form fast and fine. Honey has been eaten for thousands of years, as the honey history article traces, but the controlled method for this spreadable texture dates from the 1930s.

Creamed Honey by the Numbers

Dyce's figures scale cleanly. The table applies his 5 percent starter to three batch sizes, from a single jar to the monthly volume KOLN reported for Bee Bum. The last row is arithmetic on the patent's ratio, not the farm's own recipe.

At 5 percent, every 20 pounds of finished spread needs about a pound of starter, so a producer can hold back a little of each batch as seed for the next, which is what Dyce preferred.

The festival comes after a short year for American honey. The National Agricultural Statistics Service put 2025 US production at 116 million pounds, down 14 percent from 2024, and the average price rose 27 percent, to $3.05 a pound. Nebraska has not been listed separately in the state tables since 2023, when the service counted 33,000 honey-producing colonies averaging 48 pounds, for about 1.58 million pounds. Against that count, Bee Bum's roughly 300 colonies come to a little under 1 percent of the state's honey-producing colonies.

Honeys for a Home Batch

A home batch on Dyce's numbers starts with a liquid honey and a spoonful of fine creamed honey as the seed. The honey complete guide describes alfalfa honeys as sweet and rounded for daily use, at home in tea, on toast and in baking. Bee Squared Apiaries Alfalfa Wildflower Honey (shop Bee Squared Alfalfa Wildflower Honey) blends alfalfa with wildflower honey. For a darker batch, the same guide describes buckwheat honey as dark, earthy and malty, with notes of molasses and dried fruit. Jacobsen Salt Co. Raw Buckwheat Honey (shop Jacobsen Raw Buckwheat Honey) is a single-origin buckwheat honey, and the Jacobsen Salt producer guide tells the maker's story.

Comb honey skips the jar entirely: it is honey still stored in its wax cells. A square of Bee Squared Apiaries Honeycomb (shop Bee Squared Honeycomb) goes on a cheese board beside a creamed batch, so the two textures can be tasted side by side.

Sources & Further Reading

• Beatrice Daily Sun via Omaha World-Herald (2026): Photos, Bee Bum ready for Honey Harvest Festival
• Bee Bum Honey: about the farm, the store and the Honey Harvest Festival
• Event listing: Bee Bum's Honey Harvest Festival 2026
• KOLN (2024): Bee Bum stays busy keeping bees, making products near Beatrice
• Rural Radio Network (2024): Honeybee farm in Nebraska harvests 6,500 lbs of honey
• US Patent 1,987,893, Elton James Dyce, honey process and product (1935)
• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service: Honey, released March 2026
• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service: Honey, released March 2025