Wax!

It's been a messy couple of days in the basement!  I've been rendering my wax cappings and have been working towards making some candles and lip balm etc. 

The problem is converting the wax cappings, left after the honey harvest, into beeswax that I can make good use of.  I looked on the internet and it has all looked pretty straight forward.  First off I put my cappings in a big aluminium saucepan I got from a garage sale - do not use a new one or one from the kitchen! To this I added about an equal volume of water and simply boiled up the water/wax mixture!  I don't think the proportions were especially important and it didn't seem to matter that once the mix was boiling I thew in further handfuls of cappings. Anyway I let this boil for about 20 minutes.

Once I was happy everything was all mixed up I then had to filter the debris (bees, bugs and other detritus) out of the wax.  I read different things on the internet and I was also given advise by some fellow beekeepers.  Basically you pour the filtered water/wax mixture into a container and let the wax and water separate. Anyway, my first approach was to pass the mix through an aluminium insect screen; the type you put over a window. This worked reasonably well but a lot of scum was carried through the filter and when the wax had separated and hardened there was a thick brown scummy layer attached to the bottom of the wax.  My second try was to pour the mixture through a paint strainer (a fine nylon cloth mesh).  This proved very good at removing the scum, but some still managed to get through this. I was going to have to pass the molten wax through a finer screen to remove the final few bits of rubbish

So my last effort involved melting the wax in a jar that was sitting in a bath of boiling water, and then to pass this through a really fine screen.  I found that a coffee filter was excellent; not a paper one, but one of the fine metal ones. The wax that passed though this is lovely! I will have to try to clean this sceen and reckon that I will have to clean it in boiling water.

I haven't tried it, but I do wonder if this coffee filter would be as effective on the boiling water/cappings wax mixture?  I guess I'll have to wait until next year to find out, unless I get some fall honey!

All good fun and I now have some ingots of beeswax and some candles!