Fast and EASY way to render Honeybee wax | Cappings or brood comb

hello everybody and welcome to the hunter gatherer channel and we're back in the honey room uh it's the fall now it's october 3rd and i have pulled all of my honey supers uh i have 11 mediums and eight deeps i don't think they're all full but we got quite a bit i think there's probably i'm approximating 600 pounds of honey this fall so this video i just put out a video recently of my summer extraction i'm not going to do a full extraction video i'm going to do a video on rendering wax i had somebody ask me about that so we're going to start to show a little bit of this just how i get the wax initially and then how i render it i'm going to show a little bit of the decapping and the process but you can watch the video above here for our extraction process if you want to see that we're going to just kind of focus on collecting the wax and rendering the wax like i said this video is about rendering wax primarily so it's going to be how do i get the wax what wax i'm using and and then how to clean it up so during the year as you're going through doing your hive inspections you'll see like bridge comb and bur comb and things like that where the the bees have built from one box to the to the next from frame to frame and they fill up the the b space there or from frame to frame the other way how they bridge them together um and so you see like on here on this box we've got some wax there so when i'm going through my inspections i'll i'll just kind of clean this wax up and collect that for a later time so as i'm going through this i'm going to also scrape the wax off the boxes and just make sure everything's kind of clean so that's how you're going to collect wax throughout the season you can just ball it up throw it in a bag or something like that and save it until it's time to render a larger amount another way is um with say like dead outs and things like that you might have wax that is kind of gross you want to clean everything out you get waxed that way those that wax you're going to want to probably render separate from your caffeine's wax because this stuff is nice and clean you're not going to have all the the chrysalis and all the possible other dirt and things in it so this is going to be just straight clean wax that you're not going to have to do too much to and that's what this is these are medium frames here and uh i don't know if you can see how it's drawn out past the top bar and bottom bar you see that it's out about 3 8 of an inch out of the sides on both sides and it's that way because in a 10 frame i put only eight or nine frames in there so that has some extra b space or more than b space and so they'll draw it out to where they can't fit anymore and then they'll cap it so they'll actually draw the wax out past where it would if you had 10 frames this i have uh i've shown you before but how we decap as we use this filet knife and if we're using deeps we have this big like meat knife um anyways and it can really reach the whole frame i'll show you on a deep later we've got some of those so but this is just a i think an 11 or 12 inch fillet knife i go ahead and cut up first and then i'm going to go down on it here to clean this whole area off like so so i don't know how many of you have had issues with uh wax moth if you haven't yet you will and if you have you know how much of a pain in the butt it is so the thing is is that wax moth what they're really looking for is where the brood has been so wherever eggs have been laid that's been capped and bees have emerged from and you don't see that in this this is more of uh looks like it's it's pollen or darker honey in here but i have some and i'll show you it when i find it that the queen had come up in and laid in in the uh in my honey super and then i saw that she did it i went and found her put her down below and put a queen excluder in to make sure she didn't go back up there again and once that once the brood had emerged they filled it up with honey and i found that if it's just clean honey supers that's only been honey in the in the comb the wax moth don't come for that but once you have some that has a spot that she laid they will go to that and just decimate the frames so what i'm going to do this year is when i find those i'm going to put them to the side and i'm going to after i extract from them i'm going to actually scrape all of that wax out and uh go ahead and render that wax as well and i'll put some wax back on those frames and reuse them but i'm going to try to keep it to where the wax moth don't get into our frames and we don't have to deal with a mess later on here's one of the frames i was telling you about before you can see that there was a brood in there it's really dark in the center both sides and so this once i'm done extracting it i'm going to just scrape all that wax um into probably not this container since this is the one that i'm getting all the cappings in but i'll probably scrape it into a different five gallon pail or something and so that way it'll keep the wax moth out of this box that i put this frame in but that's what they look like and that's what the wax mother definitely looking for this is the last frame and uh as you can see there was brood in there right wax moths would love this so these two buckets are the two four six six um boxes worth of frames either mediums or deeps that had brooding at one point so out it goes [Music] i know a lot of you are saying man that's a great frame swarm would come to that it's got great beast scent on it you could use that but after having some boxes taken over by wax moth i would rather them just build it back up so i'm going to clean them all off and then i'll apply some more wax to it i decided to use the bulk tank this extraction and we've got it pretty much well let's see here it's about that full right now i don't know how much it holds i'm thinking like 40 gallons anyway we have that these are the boxes that didn't uh have brood in them nice and clean and ready to go uh we'll just store those in the shop and not have to worry about wax moth hopefully and then we have these boxes that were the ones that had brood in them that we scraped out these two buckets are wax from the brood uh frames and then we have a bucket full over there and uh the whole um decapping tank this box is full with the cappings and i'm going to render this separate from this but for now i have some containers over here that i will pour the cappings in and i'm going to put them outside and let the bees clean them up try to get as much honey off them as they can kind of dry them out and then we'll go into the rendering process this is the stuff that was scraped out here and this is some of the caffeines and this is another thing of caffeine's i need a couple more totes because i've got another bucket of caffeines in there too i'm just going to let them clean these off i know they can tear up the wax a little bit but half of the boxes don't have any wax and i just didn't want to get into the bees [Music] to pop these boxes on top i don't have any time today to do that and i figure i'll let these set here for a couple days and let them clean them all off and you know we've got other pollinators besides just the the honeybees and i know there's a lot of yellow jackets that are coming into it too but we'll let them clean it all off let them get this wax all pretty dry too and i'll also bring the uh extractor and the de-capping tank out and uh the bulk tank once i get that empty as well so they can clean all of that off this is what happens when you put wet boxes out yeah you get clean boxes but a lot of your girls die too so if you can it would be better to just set your boxes on top this is some of the really gross wax that i had from where all the dead bees were underneath the the supers it's full of bees and leaves and some other stuff but there's still wax in there and i'm showing you this way because i wanted to show what it looks like without trying the trick that i'm gonna teach you and what that is is uh i have i bought some pantyhose and uh i saw somebody do this trick so his wife gave him some of her old stockings or pantyhose or whatever and he stuffed the wax inside it and all of the bees and all of the dirt and junk all stays inside while the wax filters through so you can see this is like a lot of bees and other things in there and it's going to take quite a while to filter that out it's not just bees though you can see that is a lot of um of like cocoons or whatever from the from the brood area so that stuff makes a mess too so i just went ahead and figured i'd show you this i'm gonna have to push that all through a screen and try to get the wax out at the same time both of those were of the brood comb that i was trying to make sure that we don't get any wax moth in our supers and such so that's what those are and then we have this and this are all cappings these two are much cleaner than this one but this one i'm going to stuff into the uh the nylons and we'll see how it goes and inside all this stuff you can see well i don't know if you can see but there is a bunch of cocoons or chrysalis or whatever you want to call it and i'm going to take this as a piece of a nylon stocking and i'm going to take this whole bucket full and i'm going to jam it right in this thing see if we can fit this whole bucket in here got an idea i get them once in a while oh i just ripped a hole on it i gotta run in my stock all right oh stay up there trying to do something here there we go that'll kind of open it for a little while anyways so i think this is going to hold all of this like slum gum i think they call it and all of the all of the get that stuff pushed down um pollen and all of everything else come on we're going to call it on that one and i'm going to try another one to try to not get it running it these are no nonsense we don't mess around i don't want any nonsense going on scissors start right down at the bottom this time see what happens i'm just gonna go there hold it on there so all right i got them all bagged up and these are size b if anybody knows what that means i didn't think about sizes but size e is the biggest they show and i should have went with them then they could you know they'd be bigger but we're gonna kind of spread this out i think we're gonna do good it's gonna do well this is just about hot enough cleaning off my utensils they still had some wax on for the last time metal it conducts heat i remember that from science class it's like a little science experiment with the honeybees all the time i got about a almost a gallon of water in there and i'm gonna hope that the water does its trick i just gotta do one of these numbers get this one keep it up out keep that one out close it up check it in a while let's see how this is doing it's definitely working all that pretty wax is coming out of there gotta get these guys down in so i don't know if this is the best way to do this especially if you have a large amount but it definitely makes makes quicker work of it than if you uh are just pouring it through a screen this is what i got afterwards this clump of all those dead bees and everything but there's still there's still wax in there i might do one more try to render it again i don't know how much wax is left in there but there's a bunch so i'm going to give this a shot i'm going to put this uh smaller one right in here get a little warm so it'll let the everything drain through and won't plug it the first time i ever poured through a screen it was cold and it plugged right up so i learned put the screen in the hot wax or whatever and so that way the screen will heat up it'll let everything flow through so this stuff is just like what i showed you on that piece of a plastic bag there and it's going to have some wax in it still but getting most of it out here not all of it like i said i with that other stuff i'm gonna i'm gonna run it through one more time and try to figure out how to get everything out of it that's uh one way to get it started anyways i'm gonna put that right down there with everything else we'll get to it and do it again with this one pretty sure it's all heated up and we're just going to go for it here there was a little bit of stuff in the pan from what i had scraped off of the screen and what was left in here from the previous stuff but everything else stayed in those nylons so much easier i emptied this uh screen out three times four times when i did the other i got this little spoonful here i would say that that was a lot nicer of a way to do it so try the nylon trick if you have a lot of wax from the brood chamber or whatever and uh it'll save you a lot of time and effort i'm trying to decide if i'm gonna put the uh cappings in the nylons too because man that thing that works slick so there's a lot of bees in here but i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead and just put it in there without and just to see how much difference now this is just cappings so it should be super clean but i bet we get a a half a strainer or so of just bees out of it scoop some in there so it doesn't splash me right off the bat there we go quite a bit of wax there but you'll be surprised out how much it cooks down size wise volume or whatever there's a lot of air in that anyway let's cook this down the rest of the way and uh we'll see what it looks like when we pour this one and how much we get from the dead bees in our screen i'm hoping this bucket is big enough but the other one isn't cold yet so gotta use what i got but i'm pretty sure it's big enough you can see all these dead bees in here and a little bit of other extras oh it's splattering um so that was the fairly clean wax and that's how much extra stuff we've got so i'm pretty amazed at the the nylon trick so here's my buckets i had uh combined some of the wax from two of the meltings uh all i did four meltings and got two buckets worth so this is the water afterwards just kind of pour that out it's got a little bit of everything in it oh baby here it comes all right got one block there it looks pretty good i need to scrape this stuff off it's like dirt and propolis and whatever see what this other one looks like but that's the wax i got i don't know how many pounds that is but it's pretty good pretty good amount all right everybody that's gonna be it that's how i uh render my wax a lot of different ways you can do it that's just one way so i got to tell you i was pretty impressed with the pantyhose trick so let me know if you guys have ever tried that before down in the comments below if you would uh hit that subscribe button hit the like button uh that really helps the algorithm on youtube you hit that like button and subscribe button helps them share the video with other people so maybe other people get to see how to render wax anyways that's gonna be it i just want to let you know we love you god loves you and we'll see you on the next one happy beekeeping and let me know how you render your wax down below we'll see i'm not sure about the rest of you but um i swell up a little bit it used to be terrible um it's gotten better but i still will swell up some especially on a leg or a foot and uh it's been a while since i've been stung in the face i try to keep a net on just in case but my first year of having the bees about the first week i went out to give them some sugar water we had gotten four four nukes and i came out with sugar water and i saw you know all the youtube videos and stuff of all the tough guys and girls that don't wear any suit so i went out there to feed them without a suit and one stung me in the forehead or in the temple and my eyes swelled closed yeah my eye was closed for a week and uh it was pretty serious um i called the doctor's office and said hey i must be kind of allergic i just got stung my eyes swelled shut i took some benadryl and they said uh i said do you need me to come in and they said well can you still breathe and i said yes i can currently breathe yes do you take any benadryl i said yeah i took a took a benadryl and uh they said no you need to take like two or three and i said i'm already in a coma i can't take much of that stuff it kicks my butt and uh i said so when do you want me do i need to come in or not and they said well if you stop breathing come in it still amazes me to this day that they said that i think it's a little too late if you stop breathing but that's just me anyway but the more i got stung they said either a the more you get stung the worse it's going to get or b the more you get stung the better it's going to get and i the more i get stung the faster the swelling goes down so when spring comes along i mean i don't go out there to get stung on purpose but when spring rolls along then uh i figure the first sting is going to get me started and go from there but this year i got stung more than i have in a while i don't know if it was being careless or not cautious enough or the bees were just grumpy or what

Channel: The Hunter Gatherer

Views: 68,069

Keywords: beekeeping 101, filtering beeswax, how to, render beeswax, cleaning beeswax, rendering bees wax, bees wax, melting beeswax, how to clean beeswax, how to render beeswax, processing beeswax, beeswax rendering, melting bees wax, rendering beeswax, how to clean and render beeswax, render beeswax from honeycomb, melting and filtering beeswax, beeswax uses, beekeeping 101 course, beekeeping 101 for beginners

Id: IiHvOl_hyBM

Length: 31min 6sec (1866 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021