Cleaning Beeswax Cappings Small Batch - Processing Wax Cappings from our Small 4 Frame Honey Harvest

[Music] thank you g'day there today we've been doing a small batch of Honey Harvest just four frames and whilst the last of the honey is filtering I thought what I'd do is process the wax that we've got from the frames this is the wax and along with the wax when you cut off the capping you also get a bit of honey so what I'm going to do is pop this into the oven heat that up just enough to melt the wax and what will happen is the wax will go to the top and we'll be able to separate the wax and the honey when doing this it's a really good idea to use a reusable pen like we've got here and that's because when you finish the activity you will find a lot of the wax will actually stick to whatever container you use so either have a pot that you're willing to sacrifice or something disposable like this one here which of course you can reuse as well so let's get this in the oven and get it heating up when you're doing this you're not trying to cook the wax so a nice gentle temperature around 100 degrees should be plenty that's been in the oven now for about probably just under 10 minutes um you can see that around the outside it's melted quite well but around the middle it's still pretty firm so what you want to do is give that a bit of a stir if you can just to kind of distribute the temperature it's obviously cooler in the middle than it is on the outsides and that way you don't have to overheat it now just keep in mind that whatever you use to do your stirring is also going to be pretty sacrificial so you might want to do something like I do here and use a skewer or alternately just have a spoon that you've got dedicated to this activity now that I've given that a good stir let's get the oven back on and just continue heating it up because you can probably see there's a lot of wax in here that hasn't fully melted yet let's have another peek [Applause] all right that's looking a lot more melted now but if we're looking close we can still see that there's a few little spots where the wax hasn't fully melted so I'm just going to give that another little stir there's no specific time for this it's really just about continuing to melt until all of the wax is fully dissolved and what you'll find at that stage is you'll start seeing a bit of a separation where the wax will start coming to the surface and the Honey will be at a lower level below that now you have to excuse the background noise because I'm doing a bit of multitasking and dinner's on the go as well but I do think it's now time to check our wax again this time around it's looking pretty uniform so let's turn this oven off you can kind of see that everything's melted in there is a a few bits of debris and things like that in there but on the top of the surface you can see it's really glossy looking and that's the melted wax that's sitting on the top we'll start to cool down and solidify and as it solidifies that wax on the top will turn into a bit of a solid layer and then we'll end up with a bit of a layer of debris underneath that and then a bit more honey right at the bottom that we can retrieve so I'm going to leave this now to set and then we'll come back a bit later when it's set and I'll show you what we do with it then it's now the next day and you can see here that the wax is firmed up solidified now and that means that we can start the next step you probably notice that there's a lot of debris in here if you're having a bit of a closer look at the wax and that's perfectly fine because what I was trying to do last night was just separate the layer of this honey from the layer of wax and I didn't want to heat the honey up too much because I actually want to collect this honey and this is still good for eating because it has been heated up it's not going to be classified as a raw honey anymore like the rest of what I've harvested but uh yeah that's definitely not something to be wasted and you can collect that and I find that's really good in things like my cooking if you're doing honey soy chickens and stuff like that this tends to become my cooking honey for those types of recipes let's get on to the next step and collect the honey the first step is to remove the wax and what you'll find is if you have a container like this where the sides are flexible you'll be able to break the wax away from the sides of the container and you'll be able to lift it up in pieces once I've let the honey drain off for a bit I'm going to pop these bits of wax into a pot and this is where I'm going to refine that wax a bit further to get rid of the debris now we'll say any pot that you use for this activity needs to be a bit of a sacrificial one and you can probably see this one here has quite a bit of wax on it from times that I've done this in the past this is definitely not a pot that's ever going to be going back in the kitchen now you're probably noticing I'm taking a bit of a while at this stage just to let the honey drip off and that's because I want to retain as much honey as I can because this is all valuable for eating the dripping slowed right down on this one now as well so I'm going to pop this one also in the pot let's set this wax aside for a moment and we'll get on to jarring up the honey this one's not a canning recipe so any clean and dry jar or bottle like I have here today will do for storing your honey one of the other cool things about using these Alpha type containers is you can actually shape to create a little bit of a mouth to be able to pour there we go we're getting right to the end now and there we go that's a whole bunch of honey that we've managed to salvage that would have otherwise been wasted if you do get a couple of little bits of wax in here it's really not the end of the world but if you do want your honey to be perfectly clear you can of course filter it a little bit further between the separation stage and pouring it into your jar now that I've dealt with the honey let's clean up this wax and to do that firstly what I'm going to do is actually give the wax a bit of a wash and that's just to get any of the debris off the back and the excess honey that's still stuck on this I should mention that when I was doing the wash just then I was using a warm water because that does help with honey to wash it off and it also does loosen up some of like dead bees and wings and things like that but you don't want it too hot especially if you're doing this activity in your sink because the last thing you want is wax going down your stink and then solidifying in your drainage system so I've now given this all a bit of a wash and you can see all the Honey's gone and a lot of the bigger pieces of debris are gone as well we still have the layer of debris that's stuck to the bottom of the wax and that's okay because we get rid of that in the next stage I'm now going to let this wax dry out for a while and that's because in the next stage I'm actually going to heat this up and it's not a good idea to have water and wax together when it's hot that's looking pretty dry on that side time to flip it over the wax is now dried off so I'm going to pop that back into this pot here which I have also cleaned out and made sure that's nice and dry and I'm actually going to break this wax down a little bit in this pot now [Music] and what I'm going to do in this pot is actually use it for melting down the wax and that way we can clean it up and get rid of the rest of this debris some people do this next step in a double boiler and that's a really good idea if you're using a gas stove because wax is of course flammable for me I've got an electric stove here so it's not as big an issue as long as I manage my heat and what I'm going to do is just keep a bit of a gentle heat on this pot until all of my wax is melted and you can probably see there's a last few little bits of wax I haven't melted so that's where your skewer comes in handy to give this a bit of a stir that's pretty much melted now so I'm just going to let that cool down just a smidge I don't want it to start solidifying at all I do need to do the next stage liquid but I don't want it to be too boiling hot for what I'm going to do next now you may have noticed a couple of extra bits of Kit that's been sitting in the background as I've been doing this and one is this old baby blanket and this is what I'm going to use and you can see that I've used it before here with the the wax on it I'm going to use this for filtering I also have a container and I like to do this in a disposable container so let's set this up first of all I've got my container and then all I'm going to do is use my filtering material and pop that inside just like this and that will allow me to pour the wax in and any of the debris that's left will actually get caught on this material as I said I'm just using an old baby blanket here today if you don't have something like this a bit of cheesecloth or something like that will do the trick as well so the next step is going to be pouring our wax in here in here you can see the debris that's been filtered out by the cloth this will all start to solidify pretty quickly as that wax hardens but I will leave it just a couple of minutes just to let that wax continue to drip you can see that dripping there you can also probably see why the plastic container you use needs to be a fairly rigid plastic this is Warped quite a bit with the heat of that hot wax stop dripping so what I'm going to do is take this material outside and I'm going to give it a bit of a hose down it's definitely not a good idea to wash this down inside again you don't want the wax getting in your pipes and what I find is just the cold hose is perfectly fine to get rid of a lot of the debris as you saw when I started this exercise there was wax on it it just becomes part of the wax for the next time you're doing some processing here is my cleaned wax all nicely filtered all I need to do now is leave this for a while for it to solidify and here we have our pack of rendered base wax now the top is beautiful and clear but I am going to flip over and show you the bottom and you can see in the bottom here we do still have a little bit of honey that did manage to get through that last bit of processing it is all sitting on the bottom just give the bottom of this a bit of a wash up sometimes if I get a thicker layer what I'll do is actually get a knife and just cut a little bit off the bottom just shave it off until it gets to the nice clean wax so here we are with our completed Puck of beeswax and nearly a liter of honey and this was off as I mentioned four frames it was just a small Harvest and it probably seems like a small amount of beeswax to go to this effort for and a small amount of honey as well but when you do lots of small harvests every little bit does build up in every little bit counts hopefully you enjoyed joining me today as we were processing our cappings this is obviously not the only way to go about it it's just the way that we do it and hopefully it works for you if you're doing small Lots like us thanks for joining and catch you later

Channel: Bush Edge Homesteading Australia

Views: 4,562

Keywords: Homesteading, Sustainability, self-sufficent, self sufficent, self sufficiency, homestead, Australian homesteading, Australian homestead, Preservation, Hobby farming, beekeeping, bee-keeping, beekeepers, harvesting honey, honey harvest, cappings, capping's, wax capping, wax cappings, wax capping's, cleaning wax

Id: 1lN1SqlduZY

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023