I harvested honey from 3 hives of 5, 2 were new and hand nothing worth getting. A friend of mine came up with a genius idea. Basically we bought a new pencil holder from a store, the kind that is made of wire and shaped like a cup. So this sits in the strainer and is the first thing the honey falls into out of the extractor. The larger pieces get stuck in this and the smaller ones fall though are are stopped by the strainer itself. At the end of the day I basically had a cup of wax in the pencil holder. And it saved us a lot of time having to change strainers due to wax clogging it up.
http://www.myop.com.au/img/productImages/eldon/r22221.jpg
Out of 30 frames I got 42 and a half 1lb jars of honey and 12 smaller ones I just bought at IKEA and have come sitting in.
Wow, I am happy for you and you really got quite a lot of honey from them. Sounds great.
Annette
Good idea! I use plastic strainers and the wax can clog them up really fast. This should speed up the straining process.