Render & Clean BEESWAX - without the mess!

hey friends welcome back you've ever tried to render beeswax you're gonna learn pretty quick it's really easy to make a big giant mess I've tried a couple different ways maybe four maybe five different ways with the quantities that I have being such a new beekeeper all my quantities are small the mess that I end up making far outweighs the process it just doesn't work for me continued my research I found a way that works really well I want to share it with you guys tonight you start off the whole process by baking your wax in the oven you will need to construct a small box this was made with some one by two scrap lumber that I had out in the garage and some quarter-inch hardware cloth stapled to the back I make basically like a little filter box so what we're gonna do is we're going to take this is wax that I've rendered once before but as you can see it still has a lot of wax in it there's also a lot of junk in it which we don't want we want to separate the two so once you have your box the other thing you're gonna need is a small pan with about one inch of water in the bottom you want a pan that's about the same size as your screen if your screens a little bit bigger that's okay I typically when I take this whole contraption and place it in the oven I'll put a cookie sheet on the bottom just to make sure if any wax drips off of this part that doesn't have a pan under it it's not gonna hit the bottom my oven and make a big mess because the whole point of this is to not make a big giant mess so with your setup like this you got your pan you got about an inch of water you have your screen box here that sits on top next thing you need is a single layer of paper towels don't be tempted to double to double layer this it's it's really not needed and in fact it actually has negative effects because it slows down the wax dripping through the paper towel too much and you actually lose some wax from that because once it gets stuck and a paper towel it's not going to come out you want it to go through the paper towel as easy as it can down into the bottom so this is our wax that we have I've already rendered this once but as you can see it still has a lot of wax in it and a lot of junk so the point behind this is to get rid of the junk keep the wax the junk will stay up on top of the paper towel the wax will go down through and sit in the water once it gets in the water it's going to float up to the top spread this out a little bit now if you had a massive quantity of wax you know like there's probably not the solution for you keep things small keep things reasonable this amount is actually very small for this the first time I did this I had a lot more wax quantity wise but I've rendered it this will be the second time now so so with that elven oven temperature set to 200 and 200 only paper towel most papers I'll have a flash point of about 451 degrees Fahrenheit we're gonna stick our oven at 200 it's plenty of heat to melt the wax without causing a risk to you papers catching on fire your wood burning most woods have a flash point anywhere between 600 for soft woods all the way up to 900 degrees or more for hardwoods like certain Oaks so it is safe but that doesn't mean this is something that you're gonna want to do before bed and throw it in your oven and go to sleep for the night you want to make sure your home keep an eye on things and all should go smooth I'm gonna kick my oven on we're gonna throw this in the oven and we'll be back in a little bit and I'll show you how it all turns out [Music] [Applause] all right we are done how long do I let this bake in the oven anywhere between four to six hours depending on how much wax you actually have and how big your pile of material is take some time you need to be patient give the heat a chance to melt the wax and give gravity a chance to pull the wax down through the paper towel you can see what we ended up with you'll see a lot of wax got stuck in the paper towel it's actually starting to harden don't throw this away this black stuff this is all the junk that we that we extracted out of our wax this is the garbage if your if it's your first time rendering this down you can do this a second time depending on how much wax is in there this time I'm going to toss mine the paper towels when you're done with that don't toss it out what you're gonna end up with and I tear mine into little pieces like this wax-coated pieces of paper towel that are just about the ultimate firestarter you throw a flame to this and you got four to five minutes of great burn keep something next to your fireplace for when you need to start fires take some camping with you for getting your campfires going great stuff you lose some wax when you do this because it gets stuck in the paper towel but it doesn't go to waste if you keep it so in our pan what you end up with is the wax will go down into the water it'll all float to the surface and then when it hardens you'll end up with pieces of pure wax if you do enough of it you'll end up with a sheet that looks like this all the impurities are removed all that black junk and what you end up with this pure beeswax so it's pretty simple process like I said not a lot of not a lot of mess a little bit of waste but you don't have to do throw this in the garbage you can keep this stuff but all there is to it it's pretty simple like I said no messy filters to work with and pretty happy with this method I've tried three or four by far the easiest if you can be patient thanks for watching see you guys on the next video

Channel: That 1870's Homestead

Views: 51,078

Keywords: homestead, how to, bees, honey bee, bees wax, capping wax, comb wax, rendering beeswax, rendering bees wax, melting bees wax, beekeeping, no mess, super easy, filtering beeswax

Id: cOdzmmGXw5w

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2018