One less thing to feel to feel badly about. . .

[David Stokely]

Last weekend I harvested my first honey from my two hives.  What a miserable year, but that is for another topic.  I only ended up with about two gallons.  Years ago when I had hives I made cut comb honey.  This time I decided to do the crush and stain and that went pretty well.  I just used a very large kitchen wire mesh strainer with a handle and a large Tupperware type plastic salad bowl.  I didn't use any filter and yet I was very pleasantly surprised at how clear the honey is.  After a couple of days the air bubbles, and the little pieces of wax all rose to the top of the 1/2 gallon canning jars that I put the honey in, making very pretty looking jars of honey.

I had read that the disadvantage (aside from the work and mess) to the crush and strain method of making honey, was that it was expensive for the bees to produce wax.  I believe the figure I read was something like it takes 5-6 pounds of honey for the bees to produce 1 pound of wax.

Well after making my roughly 2 gallons of honey, weighing somewhere around 25 pounds, I was just really surprised at the small amount of wax remaining.  I haven't weighed it yet.  It's still kind of gunked up with honey, etc.  But after I wash it and weigh it I'm sure that it will be well less than a pound of wax. 

OK let's say that it's 12 ounces of wax.  At the 6:1 ratio that would mean that I lost 4.5 pounds of honey due to the producing of the wax, but there comes to mind two ways that extraction also loses wax and honey.  Cutting the caps off the comb for extraction surely represents a certain definite percentage loss of wax and in addition, with crush and strain you get virtually 100% of the honey off the frame while in extraction a certain percentage of the honey is left in the comb.

Now granted most people will give the extracted comb back to the bees for them to clean up, but that honey is lost to the beekeeper in terms of bottled honey.  It's good for the bees, but really adds nothing to the harvest total this year.

A couple of  other things that come to my mind is that I do not believe that the wax is produced by foragers, but rather by hive bees.  So, you're not losing foraging bees when they have to draw out comb.  Secondly, when my hive was building queen cells, someone mentioned something about bored nurse bees having nothing to do and therefore building queen cells. . .Is it possible that having comb to draw out might keep the hive bees from getting so bored and thereby be less likely to swarm?  I broke up the brood box by swapping in empty (and undrawn out) frames of foundation into the brood chamber and to my knowledge my hives didn't swarm even thought they had numbers of queen cells.

Anyway I had felt badly at having to crush all that drawn out honeycomb, but in pondering it over, I really don't think it represents so much of a loss after all, and in fact, I just bet that if I had extracted my honey rather than the crush and strain that I did, that my yield would have been less than what it was. . .

:) :) :)

[alflyguy]

I don't want to make anyone feel bad but it seems to me there is a huge advantage in extracting the honey without damageing the comb. I've never done crush and strain but I have extracted honey with a 9 frame radial extractor and the amount of wax lost to the bees from the cappings is very small. What is really amazing to me is how fast the bees refill the comb that is put back in the hive.

[David Stokely]

Please, I'm surely not saying that there aren't advantages to extracting, but for 2 gallons of honey there's just no way to spend a couple of hundred dollars on an extractor and this year there is no refilling of the comb at least in this area.  I guess my point is, that for a person with just a hive or two, you don't have to feel too badly about doing the crush and strain.  I don't really think the difference in yield is that much to be concerned with and I don't think the bees suffer from it.

In truth there's no way that I should have taken even the small amount that I did from them.  I put the medium deep on the second week of July and the bottom brood boxes were very heavy.  I put on a second honey super roughly the 1st of August.  The 1st being more than half full and I was going on vacation.   It was all I could do to lift the brood boxes.  When I went in, the top honey super was untouched, nothing drawn out.  I had already taken the lower medium super off and into the house before checking the bottom boxes and to my shock and dismay they were empty.  I don't mean nearly empty.  There are lots and lots of bees, but basically no honey and no pollen and no brood.

It looks like to me in August they ate well more than a hundred pounds of honey. . .EACH HIVE!!!  I tell you those bottom supers were full and now they are bone dry.

I am feeding heavily now.  I hope it's not too late.  I still have the honey that I could feed right back to them if it comes down to it.  From about 5 p.m. this past Monday afternoon to 12 noon Tuesday one hive took 3 quarts of syrup.  I have never seen syrup disappear like it is right now.  I've changed my feeding jars from quarts to half-gallons.  I cannot imagine how much sugar I'm going to go through in the next month or so. . .It boggles my mind.

Anyway, if I could jusify it and afford it I would have an extractor, no doubt about it, but until that day, I'm not going to feel badly about crush and strain.

:)

[Natalie]

I do all crush and strain and it doesn't bother me a bit. ;)
In fact I like that I always have fresh new wax in my hives and not old comb that is absorbing chemicals and pollutants from the air.
Then again I am not out to get the most honey in the world.
Bees make wax/build comb, that is what they were born to do and if there is a flow on that is enough to fill a super that has been put back on a hive after extracting then there is no reason they can't bang out a super of comb as well.

[David Stokely]

That is my point exactly Natalie.  I'm not trying to say anything against extracting, but on the other hand I don't think that I'm in anyway making a hardship for the bees by crush and straining.

I just got back from lunch.  I peeked into the hive in my backyard and of the 2 half gallons of syrup that I put in there last evening, there's only about 1 1/2 inches of syrup left in each jar.  I'm sure that by the time I get home tonight that they'll be out again.  They've taken almost a gallon of syrup in roughly 18 hours. . . I can hardly keep up with them.  I'm thinking of adding a third half gallon jar tonight.  It would be nice not to have to give them syrup every day.  Between the mixing of the syrup and opening up each hive (this includes travel time to my other hive several miles from here), it's taking me a couple of hours a night.

:-\

[Kathyp]

extracting is not practical for smaller amounts of honey.  those of us that have had bad  years are better off not wasting honey in the extractor.  if you have lots of supers to process, extracting is faster and more efficient.

[MustbeeNuts]

So ok im gonna take the other side, I only have a few hives, and the first season I used the crush and strain method. I remember at the time I said to my wife, ain't gonna do that again, it too me was a icky sticky mess. wax, honey everywere, didn't do the strainer very well. and I only did about 20 lbs of honey. I got an extractor, the second season I used the extractor, a little more honey 75lbs.
But I degress. I took the frames that were extracted. stored till this spring, when I did splits I put them on, when I needed supers on the old hive, I put them on. The bees filled and capped them like wild fires. I found that the already pulled frames helped this years crop ##'s and helped my splits move forward equally as quick.

I looked for a bit till I found a nice little extractor. Bargain priced. I love mine, I wouldn't go back to crush and strain. Yes I know different strokes for different folks. Just my 2 cents on the pro's and cons. or jmho

[Rex]

I guess I'll weigh in on this since I've tried both.  Same as MustbeeNuts, my first year I did the crush/strain.  Mostly because I didn't have an extractor and also because I had only about 5 medium frames to harvest. 

Crush/strain was easier than I had thought it would be and I got about 20 lbs out of it.  Yeah, it was a bit messy and yeah there was some small amount of honey left in the comb that had been crushed and strained.  It was the end of the season, so I just stored the empty frames until next year so the bees didn't have to work at rebuilding the comb until the next year.

This past Spring, I had expectation of a better 2nd season, so I bought an inexpensive 2-frame hand crank extractor.  I have been pulling out 2,4,or 6 frames each weekend for the last couple of months.  I scratch off the caps with a fork and spin the honey out.  Using the extractor seems more convenient, but it is a bit more work in terms of elbow grease and clean up.  Still, I don't feel like any honey is being wasted in the process -- no more than was lost in the crush/strain.

Bottom line for me is that using the extractor doesn't really take much more time to use, and I do like it that the bees can just refill the frames after I put them back in.