Cleaning really dirty wax

Borrowing from the Warre style of beekeeping, at the beginning of spring when the hive starts to put on weight, we place a new box at the base of the hive to give the bees room to expand.  Adding boxes this way results in the older boxes gradually moving up the hive, eventually becoming honey boxes, which are then removed and harvested. 

We use the 'crush and strain' method to harvest the honey and then purify the wax from the leftover crushed comb. We do this for a variety of reasons - crush and strain is low tech and easy, but it also helps to reduce the chance of disease occurring in a hive by not reusing comb. This harvesting method results in a lower honey yield, as the bees have to direct more resources into building wax rather than storing honey, but that's okay with us.

When we packed down our hive into 2 boxes for winter this year (see here) we removed the top box.   Not all the frames in this box were filled with capped honey - parts of the comb were empty.  The frames towards the centre in the harvested box contained very dark comb - not surprising considering that this was the original brood box and had been on the hive for 3 years.  If it had been earlier in the season we'd have left the box on the hive and harvested it later. However we were packing down for winter so the box needed to come off. The box below had nectar and enough capped honey for the bees over winter. We'd noted that the hive had not really been putting on much weight over late summer and autumn - it had been holding steady for the most part. Being novices we wondered (rightly or wrongly) if as the nest moved down the hive over summer (we don't use an excluder), the bees would be less likely to continue to fill the uppermost box if there was ample room above the nest in the boxes below. I think they may have also used some of the stores in the top box.  Whatever the reason, there was some empty comb in the box we removed. 

We cut out the honey-filled comb from each of the frames and crushed and strained that.  That left us with some empty, very dark coloured comb.  This was the first time we'd had empty comb to deal with - in previous years all the frames had been filled out with honey.  So what to do with that rather dirty looking comb?  Well, after asking around here's what we did.

Firstly we mashed it up and added it to some water, then put it all in a double boiler on the stove.  Here's what it looked like:

And here it is a bit later when the wax had melted.  As you can see there was still lots of lumpy stuff in there that didn't melt.

Next step was to make a funnel-shaped strainer out of some metal flyscreen and suspend it over a clean plastic bucket with some water in it.  The hot mixture was poured into the flyscreen funnel. The lumpy junk was caught in the strainer and the wax and water mixture dripped through.

We left it for 24 hours to enable the wax to properly solidify. There was a surprising amount of junk left in the strainer. 

The wax separates out from the water as it cools. What you end up with is a disc of wax floating on dark coloured water in the bottom of the bucket. Being plastic, the bucket is nice and flexible so it's easy to get the wax disc out.

The wax had a bit of gunk stuck to the bottom, most of which was easy to scrape off. 

It's now ready for the solar purification step...........when the weather warms up again. 

Purifying beeswax collected during honey processing

The only good thing about the recent Melbourne heatwave is that it presented a perfect opportunity to try out the low impact, solar method for purifying beeswax.

We use the 'crush and strain' method for processing our honey. It's a simple, low-cost, and low-tech method that's well suited to those with a small number of hives. You can read about the honey harvesting process we use here, here and here. At the end of this process we're left with the wax from the honeycomb. In order to be able to use this wax for other purposes such as candles or cosmetics, it needs to be purified. The picture below shows the gunk stuck to the wax after it had come out of the oven and cooled down:

We first tried using a double boiler on the stove to clean the wax. This is shown in the picture below. The wax is put in a heat proof dish with water and then placed on top of a saucepan containing boiling water.

the double boiler process in action

As the wax melts you need to scoop the impurities out. Once the you've scooped them all out, turn off the heat and let the wax cool.  The end result is a disc of wax floating on the water in the bowl.  With this method there's a reasonable amount of time and effort required standing in front of the stove keeping an eye on things. We found it pretty hard to get all the impurities out. At the end of the process our wax still contained some gunk as you can see below.



upper side of wax

 



underside of the wax

A much easier, low-impact way of cleaning the wax is to use a solar extraction method.  This is simple to do and only requires some very basic equipment.

You'll need the following:

- a polystyrene broccoli box (free from the green grocer)
- a sheet of glass that covers the whole top of the box
- a stainless steel strainer
- 2 sheets of paper towel
- a pyrex (or similar) ovenproof vessel with some water in it.



the equipment required (the sheet of glass is resting against table in foreground)

Wait for a warm day and set up your system. Layer the 2 sheets of paper towel in the strainer and place the wax in it. Break the wax up into pieces as required. The wax must be dry as you don't want the paper towel to get wet.

Sit the strainer holding the wax over the oven-proof vessel containing the water. Our oven-proof vessel wasn't deep enough to rest the strainer directly on it, so we had to improvise. We used 2 metal tins to suspend the strainer above the vessel.  (If you find you have to do this, select something that won't melt as it could get quite hot inside the box)


Our improvised set up before it went into the box

Place the lot in the polystyrene box and top with the glass.  You'll notice in the picture below that we've used a brick to make sure the supporting tins didn't move.

Leave the box out in the sun and let the sun do it's thing.  The paper towel will catch any impurities as the wax melts through it.  That's it - easy, huh?

So how well did it work?  The results speak for themselves as you can see below.


some hours later

When the glass is removed you can see the paper towel has done an excellent job of filtering the impurities.


 the impurities left behind

Here's the result - lovely, pure liquid wax:

The purified liquid wax

And here's what it looks like after it has cooled down and solidified:

 

Lo and behold, the final product:

As you can see you're left with a beautiful clean disc of wax. The whole process couldn't have been easier.  All it took was a few minutes to set up and the energy for the process was supplied free from the sun. I know how we'll be cleaning our beeswax in the future :)

The technique worked just as well for all the bits of wax scrapings left from cleaning frames,  the burr comb from the top of frames etc, all of which contained a lot more impurities. It's worth collecting those little bits and pieces as we found they really add up when it comes to how much wax you can extract from them.

We came across this method from the lovely folk that run the Collingwood Children's Farm Apiary (thanks Barry!)