Sounds like a political strategy, eh? It’s not. It’s an old-fashioned method of harvesting honey. There are two primary methods of honey processing, spinning (extraction) and crush and strain. What you choose depends upon the types of hives you have and what products from the hive you want to harvest.
Usually we use a frame spinner to extract the honey from the comb. This process leaves you with empty frames of drawn comb, which the bees can repair and re-use. When you consider that it takes about seven pounds of honey for the bees to make one pound of wax, it makes good sense to recycle it.
But sometimes, it makes sense to scrape the frames clean and strain the whole mess to get the honey. Perhaps you also want to harvest the honey and the wax–for soaps, or lotions, or candles. Perhaps, your bees have been goofy and making irregular and wacky comb–and you want a fresh start–so they won’t continue the weirdness. Or, maybe you only have a little to harvest and it’s not worth the set up and clean up for just a couple of quarts.
We had a few frames of wacky comb, so we decided to crush and strain. It’s simple–letting gravity do the work, and requires only the kinds of tools you’d find in any household–a collander, a big pot, and a paint straining net. It’s messy, but then, so is spinning.
We had five frames of partial, or wacky comb. In total, it yielded two quarts of honey, a worthwhile harvest. We’ll save the full frames for later processing in the spinner. In the meantime, life is a little sweeter for the effort.
tworockchronicles 
Nice looking honey! Any idea what sort of bouquet?
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Well, the early season. lighter colored honey–which ususally comes from trees blossoms–was wildly thick this year, delicately flavored and lightly floral in aroma. The midseason, which comes mostly from spotted knapweed (‘star thistle’) has an amazing floral with spicy notes flavor and medium texture. Late season honey was especially dark and earthy flavored–that’s your golden rod and black-eyed susans at work. For the honey pictured, we mixed the mid and late season honey.
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Springtime is always a busy time for us and the bees. Some of the hives swarm and sometimes we split the hives. So we are never quite sure what the bees will be up to. In addition, we enjoy comb honey. We, therefore, leave the girls to do their own thing and make the honeycomb complete with wax for us. This can be a bit sporadic so there is always some partially filled pieces. We crush and strain those bits and the springtime honey that it gives is so creamy. It does contain rape seed (Brassica napus) but it has a very creamy texture and superior flavour to our friends honey which is spun extracted.
I am not sure why this is. Is there some additional flavour from the natural honeycomb? Amelia
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Well, just as there is a wonderful aroma to the beeswax, I imagine there must be flavor in there, too. We used to harvest in the spring, leaving the honey in the hive for the bees. This year, though, we ‘consolidated’ the hives, to go into winter with a smaller profile and less open space for them to heat. This flipped our usual honey procedures. Previously, we’d leave the partial and wacky-comb frames for the bees. But since we were maximizing space, we left the very best for the bees–the fullest frames with perfect comb. Usually we’d spin, to perserve the drawn comb for the bees. This is our first experience consuming honey with so much wax in it. I’m not sure about a different flavor yet–but there are clearly aromatic notes that come from the comb–and it looks a little different, melted and in my morning coffee.
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