The Honey Harvest (Part 7)

In the last installment of the honey harvest, we bottled up the honey for our sales department (Tricia).  If you thought we were finished, well, there's one more item of business.  See, honey isn't the only thing that was harvested.  There is a by-product that is very useful.  If you remember in one of the initial honey harvest posts, Benjamin used a knife to un-cap the capped frames of honey.  The wax cappings fell down into the table and most of the remaining honey flowed through a screen and we were able to get that honey.  

All that remained in the table was the wax.  We bagged that up into gallon zip loc bags and froze it for about 3 days.

We got out the old trusty crock pot and added about 2 1/2 inches of water to the bottom.  Then the wax cappings were put into a muslin cloth 'filter' and dipped into the water.  As it warms, the wax melts and flows out of the muslin and into the crock pot.

Any non-wax particles are captured in the muslin bag and we'll go give that back to the bees.  The beeswax and water is in the crock pot.

Now we turn off the crock pot and allow it to cool.  The wax rise to the top and the honey-water is on the bottom.

Once completely cool, you pull out the beeswax disk.  By the way, to the right of the beeswax is a fresh baking pan of sourdough bagels with everything seasoning on top, ready to slice in half and stick a fried egg in the middle for a nice breakfast bagel.

We repeated the process a couple of times and have two nice disks of beeswax.  If we wanted to, we could filter again and again to get clearer beeswax.

Out of curiosity, I put the wax on the scale and found that we got 3 pounds of beeswax.

But wait!  There's more.  The bottom of the crock pot contains the water that we put in and also the honey that cooked out of the wax.  We call this honey-water.  We bag this up and put it in the freezer.  In late winter and early spring, we put this in pans in front of the hive.  The bees quickly discover this and start drinking it and bring it back to the hive.  This mimics the "flow" and induces the queen to begin laying more and more eggs so she'll have workers.  This builds the population for when the real flow starts and gives you a head start on honey production.  They can hit the ground running.  It's a natural way to feed your bees.

We are finished with the 2025 honey harvest and have put a sign in front of the house to sell the honey.  With the beeswax harvested, we can make candles.  It'll be our first attempt, but we're anxious to try our hand at it.  One thing I've looked into is making herbal salves with beeswax.  The wax can also be melted and brushed onto the frames to give the bees a head start in drawing out comb.

All good things to shoot for.  We're also planning on pulling fall honey in October once the goldenrods are done.