Harvesting Bee’s Wax

A few years ago, Tomithy caught a swarmed bee hive from my parents bees. We decided to go with a top bar hive not really knowing what we are doing. A lot of our methods are research and then arise, go forth, and fake it.

By that fall the bees were going gang busters and bees were making comb and starting to fill them with honey. We decided to not to harvest any wax or honey that first year so the bees had enough food to last them the winter. Well winter then came with a vengeance! The cold and blistering wind blew the top bar hive over and all our little bees froze to death. We decided to leave the hive alone and see if we were lucky enough to have another hive find it and take it over. We weren’t that lucky.

This year we decided that we needed to clean the comb from the hive and start processing the wax to make it usable in home made lip balm, salves and the many other products we could use it in. That is when the fun started and we really learned a lot. The people on youtube videos really make it look simple and easy. We learned a lot doing it ourselves.

Here is the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!

We cut the comb from the top bars into a 5 gallon bucket.

Inside, on our electric stove, we set up a double boiler and started melting the wax. We pours about 1 cup of water into the can with the wax.

Everything was going really well… the wax was melting down and doing what we saw others wax melting process do.

We finally got all the wax from the 5 gallon bucket into the can. Then we realized… TOO MUCH! We ended up removing half the wax and split the process into 2 halves.

We set up a container with some cheese cloth over the top of it and made sure the cloth was fastened tightly around the outside. I also made a giant foil boat too. I didn’t want the wax to spill all over my counter top. I figured better safe than sorry.

We poured the melted mess into the container. This was mostly the dirt and crud from the wax. It was so gross!

Cheese cloth is an amazing thing….LOL! Thank God I thought of the foil boat… we did have some spillage!

We put the second batch into the can and used about 1 cup of water to help with the melting process.

We started to pour the wax into the next cup and decided to remelt everything again and strain the crud on this batch also.

So after the crud was strained off the wax, we let the wax sit for several hours. This allows the wax to float to the top. Under the wax there is a dirt layer and then the water is on the bottom of the bowl.

Once the wax was hardened, we removed the discs of wax and scraped off the dirt layer.

We then placed the wax BACK into the can with about 1/2 cup of water to melt again. This step really allowed the wax to separate again and make nice pretty wax.

It is almost all melted…..

Making a new foil boat, we poured the melted wax into tall slender cups. This will make it easier to separate and allow for nice blocks of wax…..so we thought. We allowed the wax to sit undisturbed on the counter and about 4 hours before we attempted to remove the wax from the cups. Our first attempt to remove the wax from the cup was rough. The green cup ended up being mostly wax. it took longer to cool all the way AND we ended up having to break the cup in order to remove the wax. The Pink cup released the wax right away. We scraped the last little bit of dirt from the bottom of the wax.

We ended up getting 1 pound and 4.7 ounces.  I was pretty happy with the out come. Now I can work on making some health care items.