Honey isn't the only thing we're harvesting. As it turns out, there's another by-product when you extract honey. As we showed in previous posts, you use a knife to uncap the honey. This is done over an uncapping tank and all of the wax falls on a screen which allows most of the honey to flow into a collection tank located below. The wax stays on top of the screen. What to do with all this wax? We keep it and use it for making several things I'll discuss further on.
The wax is taken indoors and in batches, we put it in a crock pot on the high setting. This melts all of the wax. The beeswax is a clearish liquid, but you can see impurities floating on the surface of the melted wax.
These impurities must be strained out. The way we do it is to pour the melted wax through a muslin cloth that acts as a filter. Can you see how it has caught all the junk that was mixed with the beeswax?
The muslin cloth is draped over a sieve, and the pure beeswax flows into a collection pan below.
We allow the beeswax that's been poured into the pans to cool.
When it cools completely, we pop it out. Pretty, isn't it?
When we finished rendering the wax, I stacked it up so that you can see how nice it looks.
It's hard to get perspective on how much wax that is, so I weighed it on our kitchen scale. We rendered just shy of 5 pounds of pure beeswax!
What will we do with all that? We'll we're going to make candles this year. We also make lip balm. The beeswax is used to coat the fabric bread bags that we posted about a couple of weeks ago. Finally we use the wax to scrape on new foundation. Waxing the foundation let's the bees know that there is enough to begin drawing out comb. We'll also be thinking of new uses for beeswax.
