Harlan Atfield was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria. He said that many
beekeepers there kept their bees in clay pots one inverted on top of the other.
To harvest honey they took off the top pot and heated it on afire until thewax
melted and came to the top. When it cooled the wax was removed and you were left
with a pot of honey.
When I was in Ethiopia I saw the harves several places. In one the Hive was a
woven tube about one foot in diameter and 4 feet long. The harvesting was done
after dark and the comb was dug out and put into pots. Water was then added the
wort was mixed thoroughly and the whole mess fermented. The wax was then skimmed
off and the rest was bottled as Tej or mead. One feature of "farmers mead" in
Ethiopia is the larva floating on top. It is recommended to have a large
soup-strainer mustache to filter it out. The delicacy for the beekeepers was to
pull out a brood comb and eat it savoring the larva and spitting out the wax.
The bees were brushed into a fire to reduce as much as possible the threat of
bee stings. I guess the point is that hauling supers to a central point for
extracing the honey was not of  concern to them.