First honey of the season

[drdrday]

The wax is not destroyed, just melted. Surely it ends up in the strainer and can be recovered?

The capping's aren't destroyed they just melt into the rims of the cells or bead up and run a little way down the frame before cooling and stopping. So you don't get any wax taken off the frame. It's all still there, but of course that means you don't get to collect any capping wax.
The honey also stays on the frame. Aside from maybe one or two drips very occasionally, if you uncap and put the frame straight in an extractor you don't lose any honey or wax.

 

[drdrday]

I would like to know the true economics of uncapping vs heat gun. In terms of honey gained vs wax lost. I understand many prefer the heat gun as its quick and clean.

I dont think anyone could produce a true answer if it were to include factors such as less damage so less effort for bees to repair. But if anyone has a rough guess I would be interested.

I think the was is so thin that some of it just gets vaporized. Some melts back to the rims of the cells, then is probably chewed away when they rebuild.

I think it would be very hard to work out an exact comparison.
With a heat gun I doubt that any capping wax vaporises. They simply don't get that hot, but just melt back into the rims. Almost no honey is lost during the uncapping process with a heat gun. However, there are always a few cells that are 'resealed' by melted wax beading and running down the frame. It's only a small percentage but it does mean that unless you can be bothered to manually uncap these individual cells (which to my mind would not only be time consuming but cause the mess you otherwise avoid with a heat gun) then there will be a handful of cells of honey that aren't extracted.

With an uncapping fork/knife of course you get lots of white cappings wax (and lots more mess). Which is great if that's what you want. Personally aside from making a couple of candles a year or lip/hand balm and furniture wax for friends and family I don't use much wax and I already collect a lot through the year from brace comb etc. Although you can recover most of the honey from the caps it does take a couple of days and I don't think you get it all. I'm always tempted to just rinse the caps and use it for making mead but I haven't tried that yet (maybe this year ).

For me the deciding factor on which method I use is purely whether or not I want to collect the wax cappings. If not I'll use a heat gun.

There are exceptions, mainly when I spin out leftover stores from brood comb in the spring. The caps on these frames aren't 'fresh' so they tend to be 'wet' with honey touching their undersides. These don't uncap well with a heat gun so I uncap with a fork. Of course this 'honey' is likely to contain what I fed the bees the previous autumn for their stores (probably containing thymol or sugar syrup) so I only keep it for feeding back to the bees again next time and I'm not too concerned with losing a bit with the cappings.