Went ahead and robbed the hive. The top brood box was 60-70% full of honey, no brood at all, and still no activity in the super. I got into the lower brood box and only saw a little bit of larvae, and no eggs. Also a fair number of supersedure cells, so something’s gone awry in there. I’ll give them another week or two and re-check to see if a queen’s been hatched and laying. If not, I’m going to let them go and reboot with new stock next spring with 2-3 nucs. The yield is 24 lbs so far (about 2 gallons), and there’s still some to bottle. I crush-and-strain the honeycomb through a couple of coarse filters to keep out any bug parts and bits of wax.
Upside: it’s super cheap and I don’t have to worry about getting ahold of an extractor.
Downside: you lose the drawn comb and it takes a while for the honey to filter out.
It ends up cloudy and so forth from some pollen that gets in there and yes, it’s delicious. This year’s is almost overwhelmingly sweet.