Beeswax

There's a certain amount of honey at the bottom of the straining bucket, mixed with the wax that will never come out. I could let it drip for weeks before getting it all. Frankly I am not that patient and trying to heat our bathroom/honey room hot enough for that honey to flow out.... not really environmentally friendly. We lost maybe a half pint, at most, of honey to the drain.

I've cleaned the buckets and filtered the wax to be weighed. A solar wax melter sounds really cool, but I don't think it would get hot enough in our area. I needed to filter out the wax mainly of sticks and wood shavings from using our hive tool to scrape off all that wax from the side of the frames. I put it in the solar dehydrator, on a 90* day and it only made the wax tacky. I am not sure the best way to filter it but this is what we did.

Beeswax just off the hive looks like tiny wax flakes, think wheat germ only sticky. I didn't think to take a picture of it, but I will with the next batch of supers we take off the hive. In order to get the wax to the image of beeswax we all have in our heads it must be melted and filtered. Really just melted. It melts at 140*. I placed the wax flakes into an unused garage sale pot and placed it in the oven to slowly melt. My oven only goes down to 170* so I have to keep turning it on and off so the wax doesn't scorch and change color. Once that pot is full of melted wax I set up the next step. Using a useless tupperware (with out a lid) I fill at least 2 inches with cold water. Using one of the strainers we bought for filtering the honey, I poured the melted wax through the strainer and into the cold water. The water makes the wax harden, and you get really funky shapes too.

I ended up with 1 lb. and almost 9 oz. Which is is less than I thought we would get. But the honey that is mixed in with the wax in the bottom of the straining bucket weighs more than I expected. I was thinking we might get around 5 lb. of wax. Still... it's beautiful. Candles, lip balms and lotions, oh my.