Having harvested honey 2X this year I've collected enough wax to give candle making a go. There are more than a few things one must know to get this right so I will share what I gathered in data and experience.First, never melt wax with an open flame. The wax and it's vapor are super flammable. Second, use stuff that you 'donate' to wax cleaning/candle making and use for nothing else. A double boiler is needed.
The main issue with wax cleaning is the stuff that's not wax that is in the wax. I can not imagine what the stuff is. As you can see from the pic it is an unidentifiable muck and you want it out.So here's how. . .
In a glass or stainless pot (not a double boiler here) collect wax and fill with water. Turn non-flame heat on high until the two ingredients are indistinguishable from one another. Turn heat off and let cool completely. Pour off the water when cool and with a knife scrape off the non wax which is now stuck to the bottom of your wax disc that has hardened again. Repeat a couple of times.
To get the remaining muck from the wax put wax only (and the muck stuck to it) in a double boiler. Heat until completely melted. Pour mix through cheese cloth. Muck will stick to the cloth, wax will move through it. This too may take a couple of passes.
It's messy, time consuming, and it can even be dangerous. But if you have a hive and want wax for cosmetics and candles one has to reckon with cleaning bee wax. The one candle I made was so awful I did not bother to post it's pic. I can see now that I needed one more pass, there was enough muck unfiltered to mess it up.
6 comments:
Thanks for the info!
I wonder if some of the material is propolis, in which case that, too, can be purified for cosmetic etc. uses.
There's probably some protein in bees wax... there would be fatty acids- the stuff that didn't quite make it into wax from a chemical perspective since nobody's perfect at chemical transformations, not even the bees. Breakdown products of the wax, as it's organic and does break down slowly, oxidize and even attacked by bacteria as a food source. Then there's particulate matter... the list goes on.
do oyu let your bees clean your wax? I hear after the honey extraction, smushing out the wax pretty thin and leaving it near the hive, is good the beas will slurp up all the surface honey/pollen, you can then flip it over and crumble and re smoosh it. friends use 2 plates to smoosh it between.
thanks for pointing this out. yes we do exactly that, we leave it out for them to clean before doing all the other things listed in this post. and they do clean a lot of it! but mostly they take the honey that's left on it, not the other matter.
Have you considered using a solar wax melter to process your wax? It seems like you get plenty of sun & heat if you can use a solar dehydrator for your other projects, so maybe a solar wax melter would be a good fit for you? Here's an example of a popular version:
http://beekeeperlinda.blogspot.com/2006/10/building-solar-wax-melter.html
If you have already explained on some other post why you don't want to use a solar wax melter, my apologies! in any case, enjoy the bees.
interesting solar wax melter. i wonder though, does it somehow clean the wax? is there a way in which it gets out the non wax?
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