How To Render Beeswax from a Honeycomb

there's a couple of different ways to acquire solid beeswax from specialty woodworking stores to apiaries to health food stores but if you happen to know someone who works with bees you can render wax from honey combs directly and that's what we'll cover how to do in this video the wax is distributed throughout the honeycomb so in order to separate it you need to first boil it in water to make it easier to separate the unwanted solids from the wax I first wrap the comb in some cheesecloth I had both large chunks of honeycomb as well as some processed and I wrapped both up in a couple of packages to make it easier to deal with now once you have a simmer you can start adding the honeycomb it's quite bulky at first so you can add more to the water in stages as its soft and stuff as it boils the honeycomb breaks down quite a bit and the water turns oily in yellow once the wax is rendered and you can squeeze no more wax out of the cheesecloth pour the wax water into plastic containers and let it solidify you can see here the wax floating to the surface and any solids falling to the bottom of the water at this point it's still quite dirty and you need to further clean the wax to be able to use it to clean the wax first remove the wax cake from the dirty water then remelt it in a double boiler so any solids or dirt fall to the bottom again to further clean it you can gently pour the wax through a filter here I'm using a coffee filter and make sure you only is a dedicated filter for this since the works is very difficult to clean off completely once the wax is clean to your satisfaction you can pour it into molds or paper cups now that you have clean wax there are lots of things you can use it for however I'm going to turn it into wax polish which can be used on furniture woodworking projects metal and more to make linseed oil beeswax polish I first melt the wax again over a double boiler and then I combined four parts raw linseed oil with one part wax by volume then I slowly heat that until combined and pour into containers once the wax has solidified it's ready to be used for any project now beeswax is really cool for a lot of uses rendering your own wax is quite interesting however you need quite a lot of honeycomb to render a decent amount of wax but if you have access to some then why not try it plus it gives you a lot of control in terms of the purity of the wax this video was brought to you by home write makers of the Finnish Max HVLP sprayer the perfect sprayer for providing fine finish on your woodworking projects thanks for watching

Channel: Darbin Orvar

Views: 624,208

Keywords: honey comb, beeswax, wax polish, woodworking, diy, how to, Do It Yourself (Hobby), bees, bee hive, Wood, Hobby (Interest), Bee (Animal), render, linseed oil, Linseed Oil (Ingredient)

Id: MaplIoJbhew

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2015