Mind Your Own…

One thing I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, is a simple way to get clean bee’s wax from my old, discarded, dirty bee combs.

Bee combs go through stages… from pristine white (brand new) honey comb to nasty dirty brood comb.

These pieces are left from various cleanups I’ve done in my hives.  To salvage my bee’s wax, I created a tiny solar melter.  Since I didn’t have much, I didn’t think I needed a big melter.  I’ll go bigger next time, just to save some labor on my part!

The solar melter is simply an old tin foil brownie pan that I cut a one inch slot out of its side and bent down.  I angled it in a cardboard box by building up with some foam pieces I had on hand.  I then duct taped a piece of window screen across the slot to catch the trash from the wax.  Finally, below the bent tin foil opening, I placed a mini loaf pan to catch the clean wax.

The edges of the box are cut at an angle as well, and I laid a piece of glass over the top.  When the sun has been out, it’s worked delightfully!

The wax needed to be prepared.

Some wax simply crumbled into my hand when squeezed.  Other pieces I had to apply some pressure to!

You can see the yukky left behind junk that needs to be washed out, so after crumbling it all into a bucket, I simply ran water over it, agitated it, and rewashed it.  After four times, the water was fairly clear, so I drained the wax and let it dry a bit before putting it into my melter.

Here’s an overhead shot showing the “trash” left behind, and the golden wax dripping down into my loaf pan!  (window glass removed so you could see!)  It worked!

I managed to get 3/4″ loaf from this entire batch of wax… and it is now cut into small squares to be used in my pysanky class on Thursday!

Now I can say, I do know how to mind my own bee’s wax!

 

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