By-products from the Hive: Beeswax and Honey Water

When we butcher a cow, we use most everything except the "moo."  We make bone broth with the bones and pressure can it.  We render the tallow for soapmaking and for cooking and so on and so forth.  Same thing with the bees.  The honey is the main attraction, but there are other uses for what's left behind.  Tonight I'll show you what we did.  

Here's a photo of the cappings.  When the honey in the comb reaches the correct moisture percentage (17%, I think), the bees cap it.  In order to pull honey, you must cut the cappings.  You try to cut as little as possible so the bees don't have to work so hard to make comb and can make honey quicker.  Here is a container that catches all the cappings.  There is honey in it, too.  The honey drips down into the lower container, where it is drained off through a honey gate.

But what about all that wax?

The wax will not be wasted.  We manually squeeze as much honey as possible out of the wax.

That leaves little palm-sized wax footballs.  We throw those in a bag.

We put some water in a crock pot and warm up.  The wax is put into a muslin cloth 'filter' and is melted.

The wax runs right through and the muslin cloth catches most of the solids.  A lot of that is propolis.  We squeeze everything we can out into the crock pot that is heated up.

We set the bag that contained the wax on the back patio and the honeybees discover it quickly.  Nothing goes to waste with them.  They collect it all and bring it back to the hive to reuse.

Then we let the wax in the crock pot come to room temperature.  The wax is on top and the water goes to the bottom.

We did this numerous times to process all the wax.  It hardens into disks and then we weighed it.

Here is all of it once we were done:

The cappings from our 13.5 pounds of honey made 2.25 pounds of beeswax.  Our friend that let us use his honey extracting equipment did not want his cappings, so he gave it to us.  The cappings from his 16 pounds or extracted honey made 2.75 pounds of beeswax.  In all we have 5 pounds of beeswax!  We plan on making candles, lip balm, furniture polish, and melt some to brush on to frames prior to putting foundation in the hives to give the bees a head start.

But wait, there's more!  The 'water' at the bottom of the crock pot when the wax goes to the top isn't just water, it's honey water.  We filled bowls of it, but didn't throw it out.

We put it in freezer jars and freezer bags and will freeze it and give it back to the bees.

In the winter, when there's not much for the bees to eat, we'll thaw out the honey water and pour into bowls for the bees to come eat.  Many people feed their bees sugar water, but we'll try a natural approach and feed them their own honey water.  It'll have them fat and happy to begin making honey for next spring.