problems with my melomel experiment

So I decided to try a first time experiment with melomel using buckwheat honey and Pomegranate-raspberry cocktail juice. I used a 1/2 a lb of buckwheat honey and dissolved it in one quart of filtered water and gave adding bentonite a try as someone mentioned it can be used in wine to help the yeast. Pitched that into a 1 gallon glass jug and added my cocktail juice mixing it up then added my yeast. Within 3 hours it exploded so I cleaned it up and changed the air lock. I attributed that to how sweet the mixture is.

But that's not the problem I'm having. Seems like the honey has settled to the bottom like a gel and is now mixed in with the yeast sediment. It has been fermenting for a week and seems like all the current fermentation is coming from the honey at the bottom of the jug because you can see air pockets forming and erupting from it. I've pretty much settled on the fact that this stuff on the bottom isn't salvageable because of the yeast sediment being mixed in.

Question I have though is should I take the chance to salvage the juice and rack it to a secondary now or wait till I see the fermenting slow down a bit more to get a bit more of the honey out? Currently the air lock has a steady air bubble every 4 - 5 seconds.

You've got a couple of choices.

1 - get a sanitized stirring rod (or even a piece of tubing), and stir to mix the honey in. This may cause a Mead Eruption Accident (MEA) so do it gently. Then put the airlock back on an wait for it to finish. Then rack it off the lees, and keep racking as lees accumulate so that sulfur odors don't develop due to the Bentonite.

2 - leave it alone. The yeast are chewing up the honey at the bottom as it dissolved into the solution. They will finish the job in their own time; fermentation with honey poured on the bottom has been well documented in other forums. If you want to swirl the fermenter a bit, it may speed things along, but be gentle (or you'll get an MEA). When it gets done, rack it and keep racking it of the lees as mentioned above.

Whatever approach you take, the yeast will do their job. I'm curious about how the buckwheat and pomegranate go together; those are some pretty strong flavors.

Don't know if 1/2# of honey in a gallon really counts as a mead, but we'll go with it.

This is mead (or at least supposed to be mead). It's not (typically) anywhere close to done fermenting and ready to rack in a week.

Go with Medsen's #2 above. Don't touch the thing for maybe 3-4 weeks before you think about racking. By then, the honey should be pretty much gone. In any case, you didn't use much anyway, so leaving some behind is probably not going to hurt much in the long run.