tips on cleaning wax

[yolanda huang]

If you have a favorite youtube or hand out on what to do with the left over wax cappings and how to process it, I'd love to learn.  

Yolanda Huang

(I think I graduate kindergarten,  survived 2nd winter with hives, and 2out of 3 hives survived)

[Dan Wood]

I had a zoom presentation at ACBA about dealing with beeswax. Its direct link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Axvnryygg

Since this presentation,however, I’ve moved away from doing the first melt on the stove top to using a solar wax melter. The club has one for borrowing.

- Dan Wood

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[Gerald Przybylski]

I let the bees clean the honey off of cappings before putting the wax
into the melter.  This works for the small scale beekeeper.
Capping wax is a mixture of wax and propolis. If you're harvesting from
brood frames you get some bits of exoskeleton and silk too.

You can make a solar wax melter from a picnic cooler. (sometimes you can
rescue one without a lid from the side of the road, or get it cheap at
good-will or salvation army.
DON'T process wax in iron or ordinary steel (like baking pans, dutch
ovens, etc.  Fe stains wax.  So does copper.  Zinc isn't good either
(Galvanized)
Stainless steel is OK, and so is aluminum.

Take the cover off the hive, and spread a couple of pounds of the
drained honey-coated cappings on the inner cover (or hive-top feeder)
Put an empty box on the inner cover, and the regular cover on top of that.
Check the next day, and spread out as necessary.  You'll be able to tell
easily whether they got all the honey.  You can taste it too.

Occasionally you can get SHB larva under the wax on the inner cover. 
 Put 'em directly into wax melter along with the wax. It kills 'em and
doesn't spoil the wax. Keep 'em out of the hive.

You'll need a transparent cover for your wax melter with a tight enough
fit to keep the heat in.
Put a pan of water at the bottom if you use a picnic cooler because
evaporation it'll keep it from overheating and ruining the liner
plastic.  evaporation.
There are many ways you can do it in a wax melter.   A stainless steel
sieve with a paper towel in it over a stainless bowl works pretty well.
(maybe also from good-will rather than the kitchen)
The paper towel collects the solids the heat separates from the wax.

It's also possible to steam the dry cappings to extract the wax.

When you have a couple of pounds of pretty clean wax,  put it into a
tall pot, with an inch or so of water.
Use the very lowest heat on your stove to slowly melt the wax, and
simmer (slow bubbling) the wax.  After half an hour of simmering, turn
off the heat
and let the wax solidify.  It will shrink away from the sides of the pot
so you can pour the water out and get the block out.
The water will have picked up some of the color out of the wax, and
additional junk will be coating the bottom of the wax block.
Scrape off the gunk, and put it back into your melter.

What do you want to do with your wax production?

j