Extracting honey from comb to jar - GIF

[bruce.desertrat]

What doesn't show in this picture is that this needs to be done in a sealed room that's ~90+ degrees, 80%+ humidity that has bees battering themselves against all the windows and doors trying to get in to take back the honey you're stealing from them :P I worked for a USDA Bee research lab when I was in college, this was a more-or-less week (or two) annual task, because we had hundreds of hives in use for our various projects.

Hot sticky work, literally. We had a hot knife decapper, and an more industrial-grade extractor that took four (maybe six, it was a long time ago) frames at a time, and automatically rotated them to get all the honey out of both sides.

My reward for doing that for a week during harvest time in the summer in AZ (aside from my minimum-wage earnings) was a gallon jar of desert wildflower honey. I lost about 15 pounds in sweat alone, but it was a sweet sweet reward.