Crush and strain

Neither hive uses frames, so neither can go into an extractor, the spinning drum that flings honey out of comb and hands the comb straight back to the bees intact. Instead the keeper cuts the capped comb off the bar, crushes it, and strains the honey through a sieve, destroying the comb it came from.

That is not a small loss: a colony whose comb is cut away at every harvest pays that price again and again instead of once.

The same trade looked at from the other side is the upside: a real crop of clean, unused wax with every harvest, not the small scrapings a framed hive gives up.