Rendering Beeswax... Worth The Hassle? Let's Find Out!

welcome to the beeswax video today I'm going to show you how to turn this and this into this so this right here represents three seasons of beekeeping this is all the wax I collected over the last three seasons bur comb cappings old frames this is the total of beeswax I have this is exactly two pounds of rendered beeswax now as you progress in beekeeping you're going to come across three different kinds of wax you got your your bird home and your scrapings from your inspections you got your old gross frames and wax moth frames and you have your wax cappings from extracting now the old frame comb is the grossest and dirtiest kind of wax that's the hardest to kind of get clean the cappings are the easiest to get clean and this is what I did for the first two seasons this is all I got from my hives I was just scraping for a comb off of frames and collecting every day I get a little ball of wax and this is actually all the wax I got from this whole season I have quite a few frames from the last four seasons especially this past season I had a wax moth problem so today I'm going to scrape these down and render these frames and I also have a five gallon bucket of wax cappings from my extraction so after rendering down each type of wax you're going to get very different yield for the final product so I'm going to demonstrate that for you now I'm going to melt each one of these individually and show you what you get so the first thing we're going to do is get all this old junky wax off of these frames over here and then we're going to start rendering [Music] all right this is all of my scraped frames from 2019 all right let's get down to rendering you're gonna need an old pot don't use a good pot from your kitchen because you're never gonna get it clean afterwards so just I found this pot on the side of the road it's just a good like 16 quart pot about a third full of water you're gonna need a thermometer for that water because you're gonna heat it up wax melts at about 140 you want to go just over that but you don't want to boil your your wax because it will discolor so I'm gonna get the water up to about 160 to 180 and then turn the heat off so get yourself good thermometer link in the description you're gonna need your wax and this right here is the pro tip of the whole video right here paint strainers I got this 25 pack of paints trainers for 25 dollars and this is gonna save you a lot of hassle rendering your wax so it's just a fine mesh it's like a nylon so it doesn't melt in the water you put your wax in here you drop it in and you strain all the junk out in one swoop this right here is gonna save you multiple multiple skimmings and getting all the crap out of your wax get these linked down below and this will save you so much time all right we're about 165 right now so I'm gonna shut the heat off so we're gonna start with the Berk home this is all the stuff that I scraped off frames and lids and found in the bee yard all this season just like that drop it in [Music] now we let the pot sit for a couple hours and cool down and all the wax is gonna float up to the top and it should make a nice disc all right it's been a couple hours and things are definitely solidified in here water's still pretty hot but I'm gonna take this out so it's about a quarter inch thick all right so this water can get tossed and we're gonna do another round so the bag that I dipped in has cooled off this is what comes out it's like propolis and and you know cocoons from brood comb and all kinds of dirt and debris and stuff so there's a tiny bit of wax in there but it's it's not worth doing another melt for all that so that's gonna get chucked as well this is the result of the first melt of 2019 so there's a little dirt down there it's about quarter inch thick so let's do another round with another batch of wax alright so I have the bag filled up with the the wax that I scraped off of the frames so I'm just going to dip it in the water and hopefully they'll all melt through the bag [Music] this is the rest of my scraped frames I just reheated everything up because I can see the layer of wax settling on top of the junk so now I'm gonna let this cool and we should have a nice disc of wax on top of junk which we can scrape off and then remelt alright this has been sitting overnight the water is completely cooled and as you can see the entire pile of scrapings from 15 or 20 frames yielded this a very thin sheet of wax with a lot of junk on it so this is just almost see-through you can see right through it so this was probably almost 20 frames scraped off and this is what I got this Plus this which I mean I could render this more and get maybe a handful like a tiny little bit more wax out of here so this is mostly brood cocoons there's some propolis in here probably just dirt and debris dead bodies but basically garbage that's not really useable that's just to show you what you get after all that work you know there's not even the candles worth of wax in there all right now it's time for the good stuff this is the wax capping this is the cream of the crop the the cleanest stuff there is definitely some debris in here but I'm gonna skim that out with a clean strainer and it's gonna go right in the hot water and this should yield a nice thick cake of wax maybe I'll do this in two rounds [Music] all right let's put it in [Music] [Music] okay the water has heated up it's just simmering it's not boiling but it just started to simmer and that big ball of wax has melted so I turned the heat way down to low and I'm gonna pull the bag out now try and get it in one swoop here and get all the garbage in the bag still wax dripping out there a lot of garbage still in the bag [Music] right Heat's off now that just has to cool and settle and this is what we were left with a little bit of wax still dripping out here but yeah this is the garbage that was in the in the the cappings so pretty good yield out of that it was like a five gallon bucket and this is all that's left now that just has to cool all right it's been a few hours and things seems to have solidified here I'm gonna pop this out whoo that's a big block of wax okay you know what I don't think it's done yet oops it's not cured yet I messed up all right well I've never dealt with this much wax before so it's not cooled off yet I thought it was cool but it's not okay got to let that cool some more all right I tried taking this out too soon and it was a little bit misshapen on the bottom underneath but it finally gelled and got a nice chunk of wax here and this is the cake you know we got a good inch thick chunk of wax here all right so to summarize this is the result of all the cappings all the cappings that I saved as I was harvesting cutting off the cappings off the frames putting them aside this is about five gallon tub of of cappings melted and rendered out this is the waste from the cappings so not a lot of waste but you know still some dirt and debris in here and that's that's not usable there so but the strainer pulled that right out so that was a nice little system here this is the result of my scraping of Burke home from the whole season this is all the wax I got so it's about a quarter of an inch thick pretty good disc this is you know worthy of about a candle or so I'm gonna render this down again let the debris settle out on the bottom maybe pour it through a strainer and this will yellow up and clean up nicely so this is good wax this is the waste from that wax so you know being careful and scraping your frames every day and saving your wax coming home with a ball of wax after every inspection will net you you know something like this at the end of the year and that's kind of what my wax looked like the first year or two just a thin disc of wax that I saved and saved and then last year I put three years worth of wax together to get this so this is three years of savings and this has also been melted filtered melted filtered two or three times over three years so that's the total from the previous three seasons and the big lesson today was after scraping all those frames I mean I saved all those frames I put them aside I spent you know 15 20 minutes scraping them off had a huge pile of scrapings wax debris put it all into the paint strainer and that was the waste it was you know 99% waste that is all garbage in there and then a very thin slice of wax you can you can see right through this so and it's very dirty this is have to be rendered a couple more times to get this to look to look yellow but this is almost not worth the trouble it is waxed so I don't want to just throw it away but it's a lot of work and a lot of waste and a lot of energy for a tiny little bit of wax so that is the lesson for me probably the lesson for you that's that's what that looks like so I'm probably gonna melt this down one more time put this through the strainer and let this solidify in the pot with would let the water completely cool so I don't have this sort of disaster again but that's the thing about beeswax is you can keep melting it and then re re solidifying it straining it and it just keeps getting cleaner and cleaner so this will be melted down and form a nice disc I'll probably melt this a couple more times as well put this through a strainer and add this to this wax maybe even add it all to this wax so we'll have a nice big block at the end that will the cumulative amount of wax from from four years of beekeeping and this stuff here I will keep separate I'm not going to mix that in because this is that's gonna take forever to get clean I don't know what I'm gonna do with this but that's that so the goal is to have a nice big block of wax and then a future video and they learn how to make a candle or some chapstick or beard balm as someone suggested I'm not exactly sure I've never done anything with my wax so that'll be another video but for this I hope you learned something if you did give me a little thumbs up comment down below and please tell me how you render your wax and how you would do this differently because I always love reading comments so thanks for watching have a great day [Music] [Music]

Channel: Vino Farm

Views: 177,853

Keywords: render beeswax, render honeycomb, honeycomb, honeycomb frames, rendering beeswax, melting beeswax, cleaning beeswax, how to clean beeswax, how to render beeswax, beeswax processing, honey comb, rendering wax, beekeeping 101, beginning beekeeping, beginning beekeeping videos, wax cappings, brood comb, natural beeswax, old brood comb, rendering brood comb, rendering beeswax crockpot, processing beeswax at home, processing beeswax cappings, how to clean beeswax at home

Id: GPoBhWePmiA

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019