I pulled a foundationless frame of honey from one of my honey supers yesterday:

A frame of capped and open honey. (September 3, 2011.)

Then I cut it up:

Cutting out the honey. (September 3, 2011.)

Then I ate some, biting right into the comb, had the biggest sugar rush of my life, and then cut the rest of the comb off the frame. It came to about 4 pounds of comb honey (1.8kg).

Approximately 4 pounds of raw honey comb. (September 3, 2011.)

After I fully recovered from my heavy duty sugar crash, I crushed the comb with a potato masher:

About 4 pounds of crushed honey comb. (September 3, 2011.)

Drained the honey through a standard kitchen strainer overnight:

Filtering most of the wax using a standard kitchen strainer. (September 3, 2011.)

I removed the bowl the next morning:

Left over beeswax after draining overnight. (September 3, 2011.)

Put the sticky beeswax aside (I’ll let the bees clean the honey off it later):

Honey soaked beeswax. (September 4, 2011.)

And here’s the left over liquid honey:

Approximately 3 pounds of liquid honey from a 4 pound frame of honey. (September 4, 2011.)

I don’t have the exact weight of it yet, but according to our measuring bowl in the photo, it’s about 1000ml (1 litre), and one litre of honey weighs approximately 1.425kg, which is a little over 3 pounds of liquid honey. Not bad.

September 5th, 2011: I’m not sure about any of the measurements. 1 litre of honey might weigh more than 3 pounds. I’ve weighed the four bottles and each of them comes to just over 1 pound each, minus the weight of the bottle. That’s about 4 pounds of honey, not 3. I’ll try to be more exact when I bottle of the rest of this year’s honey.

Septeber 8th, 2011: I crushed and strained another frame of honey comb last night and lined the kitchen strainer with a reusable paint strainer. It filtered out all the small pieces of wax. (I didn’t know what a paint strainer was until I got into beekeeping.)

January 23rd, 2012: I used a paint strainer for straining some larger batches of crushed comb, but it’s not necessary for a small batch like this. The regular kitchen strainer seems to works fine. It looks like some wax will make it into the honey but will rise to the top as the honey clears over four or five days. A little bit of wax won’t hurt anyone, and the amount is small and easily scraped away (that is, eaten) with the first spoonful of honey. Wax adds flavour and texture that most grocery story honey can’t even compare to. I’m not concerned about wax.