Rendering Beeswax from honeycomb

all right today's video is about rendering beeswax and the process i use to do so uh it's a little bit more complicated than it needs to be for me this is the first time i've ever done it and i'm going to be refining the process in the future but for now this is what i do [Music] all right if you've watched some of my previous videos you'll see that i did a cutout of a beehive and a house here a little while back and along with that i ended up with a bunch of comb that needs to be rendered down into raw beeswax i can use that beeswax later to put on frames for bees and help them to establish their hive easier there's also a lot of comb that had honey in it that was unusable other than to give back to the bees now the comb that i could use i strapped onto these empty frames with rubber bands to hold in place and that way the bees don't have to draw out new comb they can just go right to work laying eggs and putting resources in it so i basically took all of the messy honeycomb and putting these five gallon buckets so once i get it home i use my hands and kind of crush up the honeycomb and release the honey from the cells and then i put it in the sieve device and it sits and drips down through it and separates the honey from the honeycomb i do this because i'm going to stick this in the hive and let the bees have it back but if i just stick raw honeycomb in there it'll drip all down through the hive and make a big old mess and possibly overwhelm the bees so i'll feed this raw honey back later but right now i'm going to separate it this is what the comb looks like after it's set overnight and drained it's still sticky with honey but the vast majority of it has dripped down a lot of this honey is unusable for humans this hive was in the house for over eight years so you know eight years of tons of bees crawling all over the comb just gets the comb dirty and nasty you can see how black this comb is that's from just years and years of use uh babies after babies after babies being born in it and bringing in dirt from workers and stuff like that so you know that honey has taken on a flavor that's not very pleasant and it's just not usable you'll never separate all that dirt and stuff out of the honey so bees don't mind they'll take it right back what i've done here is just added a medium honey super on top which made an open cavity up in the top of the hive i dump all this comb in here and then of course you got to clear the the top entrance there so the bees can come up out of the hive into this honeycomb and they'll just walk up in here and they will clean every drop of honey off of this and it'll be dry as a bone in a couple days so once the bees have cleaned all the honeycomb i take it out and i put it in these containers and i just let it sit out there so the bees can kind of finish picking over it once i dump this honeycomb in there there's some residual honey in the bottom of the bucket and it don't take long for all the bees in the yard to find it they basically pile in there and stack on top of each other and smash each other down into the honey it's like a giant mud wrestling competition but with honey and the bees will easily drown so the only way to really save them is to dump them out onto a flat surface now they're all covered in honey you can kind of see it glistening off their wings and what they're going to do is go around and clean each other they kind of got to do this because you know they're not going to survive if they can't breathe they're covered honey you'll notice they're all cleaning each other so if you listen real close though you can hear them and what they're saying [Music] this is a few days later and we're removing the same comb you just saw me put in there and you can see they've picked it completely clean look at the amount of bees that are in there uh they've taken every bit of that residual honey and moved it back down into the hive where they can use it so once you've got it all dry like this it's time to boil it get about four inches of water in the bottom of the deep pan and start started boiling now i would recommend using utensils and pans and anything you use make it specific to this process because you cannot get beeswax off of something to save your life it's just a mess i think i got this pan for six seven bucks at walmart so anyway get a good rolling boil going and just start dropping your column in there and let it boil [Music] there's a lot of extra junk in old honeycomb like this whenever a larvae pupates it leaves capsules and material in there you can kind of see little shiny bits that's just excess material that's not going to melt down in the water and all the dirt and debris pieces of whatever there's a bunch of dead bees that are mixed in it all just kind of settles to the top of these pots and looks horrendous definitely don't want to eat this pot of beans [Music] now once it's been boiled real good it's time to start separating the junk from the wax you can kind of see the yellow wax floating on the surface there and coating the stick i definitely recommend the lid keep it from splashing all over the place there's all the junk that needs to come out so i use a little strainer and just kind of shake it a little bit i also try to press it out and get what i can out of it basically definitely don't want to let as much as you can you don't want to let it go to waste there's a lot of wax that's retained in this material and you get all this junk out and then just toss the junk [Music] also if you have any way of doing this outside that would probably be best makes quite the mess but the next day after it's cooled down here we have hardened wax and the bees have already found it so you just basically take your pot and dump it all the nasty water and there's your block of beeswax a lot of the nasty will be retained on the back of it so i just like to take a scraper and just kind of scratch off what i can of it and try to get it as clean as possible that'll make the next process just a little bit easier [Music] so for the final part of the process i took a empty b frame and just attached some screen to it with staples then filled a turkey pan with water something i can throw away then i line this with paper towels two different layers and then i just stack these chunks in here and so all the excess debris in there will melt down through it inside the oven just try to stack them on here the best you can and i got a pretty good pile and you slide it into the oven i put a layer of aluminum foil underneath of it to catch any possible drippage since the b frame overlaps and then checking on it you can see that it's slowly melting and dripping down through the paper towels [Music] and after the process is over with this is what you're left as you can see the dirt didn't penetrate the paper towel it all just stays on the surface and the wax just runs right through now some wax is lost to the paper towel but that's all right the majority of it we got so you can see a little bit of dirt made it through to the second layer but the second layer stopped it and there's a little bit of heavy buildup in certain spots but whatever you do don't throw this stuff away these things make great fire starters wax covered paper towels is just like a giant candle tear it up into little sheets something that you can store easily and travel with easy to throw in a backpack and uses fire starter and being that it's covered in wax it's waterproof dunk it in water pour water over it no problem a little bit of water residue on the outside makes the flame just take a second to catch but once it does burns great and it'll sit there and burn slowly as it consumes the wax over the paper towel just wedge it in a fire and you're good to go i like to square them all up throw them in a giant zip lock take the air out of them and store them checking back in on the wax you can see it's starting to harden and it looks like there was a little dripping going on all right now that the wax has hardened overnight we're going to drain the water out of the pan and find out real quick that this stuff is stuck to this turkey pan like glue it took a little bit of manipulation but finally got it to break loose and voila you got a big chunk of wax now the thing i use beeswax for is to put on empty frames that are going in the hive the frames are made out of plastic and the bees recognize the plastic as a foreign material so sometimes they're reluctant to build on them and by adding some of their own beeswax to the plastic it encourages them to build now if you don't have the beeswax on it sometimes it can look like this this is the plastic and then they'll build a section that's raised up off of the plastic that they can travel underneath it's almost like they don't want to touch the plastic [Music] so now the question is what to do with this big chunk of wax so i've got some molds and you got to get yourself some canola oil or cooking spray something that can help release it you can buy a special spray just for releasing stuff from molds i'd like to take a little paper towel and just kind of dab the excess out of it so don't mess with the molding process and then heat up your wax admittedly this is not the best pan for this it doesn't pour evenly and it goes all over the place made quite a mess doing this but uh like i said we'll refine this in the future fill up your mold and let it cool next thing you know you got one ounce bars of beeswax you can throw these in a ziploc bag pretty easily and store them and use them whenever you're ready if you want to do candles or add them to b frames later on whatever you want to do they're easy compact just grab your handful of them throw them in melt them down and use them however you need now you can also do candles and this here is just a little test thing that i did i rolled up a piece of paper towel and dipped it and there you see it makes a little candle you can get a kit made specifically for making candles but anyway stick her down here and we'll light her up see what she does [Music] [Music] a large block of wax can be really hard to deal with so making it manageable like this is a lifesaver they also have other molds this is a silicone mold it's very pliable and it releases the wax so well i wish i could find a one ounce bar mold the silicone this is the wax drying time lapse and you end up with with bars like this i'm not sure how many ounces each of these are but much better than a big block [Music] all right so that's my process for rendering beeswax from raw honeycomb to finished product like i said there'll be some refining to this technique as i come up with new ideas and try different things but for now that's how i do it now one thing i will say is this is really messy and i had to do a lot of cleanup as i went thank goodness for a solid cook top that i could clean wax off of real easy with a razor blade but if you can do this outside i would recommend that the only caution i would give you is if you're using a bunsen burner or something you know something with a flame um wax is flammable so you know be careful with that you don't want to have yourself a raging fire to deal with also so anyway if you liked how i did this and you like videos like this then subscribe and uh if you could do me a solid and help me out hit the like button all right y'all have a good bye

Channel: Ryan Grady

Views: 722,723

Keywords: bees wax, honey, honey bee, rendering bees wax, how to render bees wax, bees wax mold, boiling bees wax

Id: 3JrmSet7gPs

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021