From Trash to Treasure: How to Render Beeswax

so welcome back everybody about a month or a month and a half ago I posted this year's honey harvest video and during that video I asked if y'all might be interested in seeing the process of rendering beeswax this year and a lot of y'all said that you were interested in seeing that so today is the day we're gonna take all the beeswax that we've got and we're gonna render it down into something usable now rendering beeswax is really just a fancy term for taking beeswax the cappings that you get off of the frames or the bur comb that you find in your hives during hive inspections taking that wax boiling it down straining it filtering it and getting all the junk out of it and turning it into something that's usable and marketable so let's get started I'll show y'all step-by-step how it's done and hopefully we'll get a good bit of wax this year so as I said there's a few things that you're gonna need first off if you haven't done this in a while like I have it's been several years since I've done this you're going to need some instructions so make sure you've got some good instructions handy and I will try to find the link to the instructions that I have here it's a pretty good set it works well now you're gonna need your wax of course we're gonna wax and I've got another bucket as well but we're gonna take this mess and we're going to render it down into this right here this is the good stuff that is the finished product of rendering wax and this is a heck of a lot more usable than that bucket I just showed you you're gonna need your wax you're gonna need some instructions you're gonna need some newspaper just any newspaper will pretty well do you're gonna need a screen to filter out your wax with and I'm gonna use my honey strainer and I just hope it recovers from this you're gonna need some pots I think I have two of these because I have a good fit to do you're going to need a very large pot such as this one to Bowl your wax in and you're also gonna need some pantyhose now I went ahead and I got two sets of pantyhose and I know this seems kind of ridiculous but this stuff is very very fine and what it does is helps to filter out the very fine particulates from from the from the beeswax now I mentioned earlier Burke home the bucket that I just showed you this stuff right here this is the stuff the wax cappings that you get off of the frames as you're harvesting the honey this is what you call Berk home right here and this is the comb that the bees make on the insides of the hives wherever they've got some extra space sometimes they'll put it between the top bars at the top of the frames and the top of the hive or they'll put it between the bottoms of the frames and the top of the frames and the Box down below but it's just wax that they fill in spaces with and this is not in such a great shape it's usable but it does it looks like a wax moth or something that's been in it but it is usable and we're certainly going to we're certainly going to go ahead and render that down but you actually get the most and a cleanest wax out of out of bur comb like this because in the in the frames you've got a lot of trash you've got a lot of cocoons and you've got a lot of junk that you have to get out but the Bur comb is always very clean so that's it let's go ahead and get started and see if we can do so a word to the wise before we start doing this don't go into your wife's kitchen and just start grabbing pots and stuff to do this with you need to buy your own dedicated stuff for this because this wax once you use a pot for this the wax does not come off at the inside of these pots also it would be very wise of you to do this outside in your shop or if you do not have a shop do it in the yard just figure out some way to do it it's not in the house because wax is extremely difficult to get off of things and it's gonna make your life a lot simpler if you use your home stuff your own dedicated stuff and just just a boy doing it inside of the house just as an example is a pretty funny story I used to be very active on the beach source.com beekeeping forums and somebody posted one they just an absolute panic they had brought one of their hive bodies inside of the house and stuck it down on the carpet now and they had actually gotten the propolis in one WAGs it was propolis on the carpet and they could not get it off when they stuck that box down it stucked at the carpet and he was having the time getting it off and he was just begging somebody for some advice before his life got home so propolis is bad but beeswax is also pretty bad as well so just get your home stuff and you'll save yourself some heartache I like to use this propane fish cooker for this it puts out a lot of heat and it's portable so you can put it pretty well ever you want pretty well whatever you want it I've got this very large stainless steel pot your best bet as per my instructions of how is to use stainless steel because that way stuff doesn't leach out of the of your pot into your wax [Music] [Music] so now that we've got our captain's in our pot we need to fill this up with water now what we need to do is take note of where these cappings are in this pot and then we need to fill it fill it up with water up to that level then we need to add about half as much more so for example if you have to add a gallon of water you add the gallon then you add another half of a gallon to get it up to the point where you want it alright so that's got it covered and now we need to add about half that much more and that should do it right there so you want to turn it up on high initially just to get the ball going and also I am going to stir this just a little bit just so there's not wax that's stuck to the bottom down there I just don't want it to just don't wanted to get way too hot on the bottom because this is a lot of heat that we're dealing with I don't want the wax to be stuck in one spot I think I'm gonna add a little more water also but you really want to get the heat up initially so that it starts boiling and then once it starts boiling I mean you really want this to boil hardcore once it starts boiling you'll leave it boiling for about 30 minutes make sure it doesn't boil over turn your heat down if necessary I'm gonna add a little more water if you add too much water it's really not a big deal because that wax is going to separate out from that water the difference is it just may be a little less convenient when you're pouring it up because you may not have enough volume in your containers later but it's not gonna hurt anything if you have too much water you just don't want to have not enough water I'm gonna go ahead and add the Burke home and the extra stuff that I've got in a jar over here as well so I've got a little wax from a few years of guns that I never really cleaned out properly I'm gonna go ahead and throw that in little rerender that and get something useful out of it here's my Burke comb from the years past I don't do a very good job as a beekeeper of saving my Burke comb which is really a waste because it's very very valuable stuff it's a little more wax this is just really dirty I don't guess I ever finished rendering this last time we'll throw this in here as well all right so now we just need to let it boil give it a good stir and then we'll check our temperature about 125 degrees right now we're getting that we're getting there slow [Music] and this turns into the nastiest mess you have ever seen you will not believe how in the world you won't understand how in the world we can get such beautiful wax out of this we are getting close guys all right so we got it bowling I'm gonna turn the heat down a little bit turn it down quite a bit just so it doesn't boil over if it boils over it's it's gonna be a real mess so guys we want this mess to boil for 30 minutes so let's go ahead and start our timer so guys if you can see I've got the heat turn pretty low it was trying to bowl over you really want this to bowl pretty um pretty vigorously but I've got the pot pretty full so it can't without boiling over you might do better off put a little bit less in the pot but for now we're just going to make sure this says stays steadily boiling for 30 minutes at a low heat I'm gonna go ahead and spread this newspaper out what we're gonna do is when we strain this wax through our screen we're gonna take the junk that's left in the screen and we're going to dump it out on here and we're gonna make fire starters out of it all right so we're actually past the 30 minute mark now what we're gonna do I'm going to give this one more little stir which is really probably not necessary but it makes me feel better we're going to turn the heat off and then we're going to pour this up so I don't think I mentioned earlier but if you don't have one of these screens right here this is actually a screen that you use to filter honey or to screen honey I'm gonna use it and like I said I hope it recovers but if you don't have one of these you can use several layers of cheesecloth also and that'll get the job done so this is what we're left with this is the coarsely filtered results of what we just did what we're going to do is let this sit overnight and what this is this is water and beeswax and a lot of fine particulates what'll happen is the wax will float to the top and solidify and well it will be able to break that off at the top and then we'll filter it again to get all the fine stuff out unfortunately there's some bees that have taken a dive into here there's a birth right now so they're pretty well coming from the hives to try to find some honey or wax or whatever they can get so we'll let this sit overnight and come back to it tomorrow and see what we've got [Music] [Music] alright guys this the next day we're gonna clear a table off here I probably should have used probably should use more newspaper here this is bled through and it's sticking pretty bad so work to the wise use more newspaper when you do this but anyhow we're gonna clear this table off and then we're going to get our wax out of our out of our pots and see what we've got so guys here's what we're left with this is the pot that had the most wax in it the other pot has some wax in it too it's not quite as much but we'll dig it out as well really excited about this because this is some really pretty yellow beeswax and I'm really excited to see what it looks like once we filter it through the panty hose as well but let's see if we can get this out of here and and see what we've got it's stuck to the sides let me see if I can get some heat on to the sides and get it unstuck oh yeah there we go there's our first wax cake and I'll have to say that is a nice one that is a that is a thick chunk of wax right there let's get yeah let me get y'all a closer look here so here's what we've got guys this is our roughly processed or whatever you want to call it our screened wax cake it's got the big chunks out which includes all the cocoons bee parts bees stuff like that there are a few bees left in here but these are the ones that actually flew in after we have to be boiled that stuff down you see the bottom you've got a bunch of junk on the bottom here we'll filter that out as well that's the that was the main cake right there this is the other pot and the only reason I used two pots is because I didn't have enough I didn't have one pot that was big enough for all of that liquid but here's our other one you can see it's very thin but it's wax and we're gonna we're going to get something out of it too so let's get started on the second step here so we're ready to melt our wax now this is the part we really need to be careful about because you can melt this wax directly on the heat but it's much safer if you use some kind of a double boiler because we know wax is quite flammable and if you get it up to a certain point it's going to spontaneously combust on you and putting out an old fire and wax fire is not an easy task so what you want to do and make sure your stuff is clean for this I'm making sure the bottom part of my double boiler is super clean for this because this is the boiler I'm gonna strain my wax into after we get it melted the top top boiler doesn't really it's not quite as important what we're gonna do we're just gonna put our bottle folder down here and put a little water in it let's get the job done sure this is clean we'll just click that one on top like that and just kind of make a makeshift double boiler let's get this thing lit so while our wax is mounting we're gonna go ahead and prepare the final mold for our filtered wax cake now this is just a pie pan or a cake layer pan or something and there's instructions that I have say to use a like a half gallon milk carton that's waxed on the inside I'm gonna use this and what I'll do is once this is dry I can just break it into pieces and I'll store in Ziploc bags because the weight of this wax is not important to me because I don't sell the wax I think we're going to try to make some candles this year but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna spread out parchment paper inside of this just to make it nonstick and so here's what I did to make this parchment paper take the shape or maintain the shape of this container I just took some tire out some zip strips whatever you want to call them tie them around the edges I shoved this lid in there to keep that shape to make that parchment paper be tight to the bottom right here in the sides now if you want to you can buy the beeswax molds they're much nicer you can get them from the bee supply warehouses I don't have any of those I really don't do this often enough to justify buying any so I'm just kind of using what I've got but we're gonna use this we're gonna use this set up right here I think it'll work good [Music] so I'm going to pour this into one of these leg holes here the reason I'm going to do that instead of instead of out here is this is stretched pretty tight which means these holes right here are a little bit a little bit bigger and we're not going to give this good a filtration out of this right here as we are out of this what we'll do is we'll pour the wax into these two leg holes and then we'll take this off we're not going to squeeze the pantyhose once we get it off because that'll squeeze out a lot of those particulates that are trapped in the pantyhose [Music] so guys here it is all we've got to do now is pour it up into our mold you can see over here we've got a little bit of trash that actually appears to be water mixed with some little bit of debris I'm not gonna worry about that because it's separate and I think maybe it'll separate once we get it Ford up into the mold anyway so let's get this poured up and see what we've got so guys this is what we're left with this is some of the prettiest yellow beeswax I think I've ever seen look at that didn't have quite enough room in my big mold so I got I put some in this mold as well left all our contaminants in this little pool right here thankfully it all sent to the bottom hopefully it'll stay that way I'm not sure it looks kind of dirty but there it is we just got to wait for it to dry now [Music] this guy's if you've been working outside all this time it might be valuable to move it all to the inside of the house now just get a place where you're not going to mess up the table put something down newspaper trash bag whatever try to keep this wax off of stuff but it's usually better to move into the house or into a really clean spot at this point just so you don't contaminate this wax because if you go to making candles with dirty wax nobody's going to buy it it's going to be pretty gross but what I did I was kind of running out of time you don't have to do this but I came in and I put this wax in the refrigerator and that hardened it up a little bit faster I let some let's get it apart let's get it out of this container and see what we've got [Applause] [Music] so that actually worked a lot better than I then I thought it would let's get a close-up of that that's really pretty so I use this model as simply because I ran out of space in that big mold that I was using let's see what these do as there's those contaminants then we were worried about so here's the one that had the contaminants in it it was actually water and trash we can just rinsed all the water off and we can just scrape that dirt off and it should be fine so guys that's all I've got I really appreciate y'all watching I'm very pleased with what we got out of that wax that was just one batch of beeswax the other one is currently out there hardening and I'll be able to pour it up pour it probably next week I'm not gonna have time this week but that's it I'm very pleased with this wax that we got the color could not be more beautiful I wish that y'all could smell it it's got a it's got like a sweet kind of a kind of a vague hint of honey aroma to it and it's just it's just beautiful it's just really nice stuff and it's just a wonder to me that these can make such useful things being a little winged insects they can do so many useful things for us it's just tremendous to be able to see our creators hand in all of this but I appreciate y'all watching I hope that y'all enjoyed the video and I will see y'all next time so if you remember I mentioned earlier about making firestarter out of some of this stuff this right here is the cocoons and the large particulates that we filtered out during the wax screening process during our initial melt and we have the water and the wax bowling together and then we ran it through the screen this is the stuff we dumped out on the newspaper supposedly this stuff makes a pretty good fire starter and I can see how it would because it's just you know that trash from the from the hive infused with wax this seems a little bit wet like it's got moisture in it but let's light this and see how it does all right so it's pretty clear I did something wrong there I can see how it would probably work it's got a lot of wax in it but I think you probably have to let it dry first because there's also a lot of water in it and it's just not gonna burn with with all that water in it so let it dry and I think you'll have a pretty good fire starter [Music]

Channel: Fall Line Ridge

Views: 978,606

Rating: 4.9049397 out of 5

Keywords: Beeswax, bees, honeybees, Fall Line Ridge, homestead, homesteading, golden wax, wax, diy, honey harvesting, honey, wax rendering, rendering, Beekeeping, keeping bees, bee keeping, apis melifera, apis mellifera, apiary

Id: Ck68V06ZqzA

Length: 26min 4sec (1564 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 07 2019