Rendering old beeswax making it useful once again.

hello thread here today is March 13 2020 I'm up at the Abbey you know just stuff this right here beeswax I've been rendering wax now probably for four weeks just going through my supplies of cut out wax and cappings and any kind of wax I've been finding in the honey house I've been melted and it's taken a while I'll probably process these four blocks of wax at least at least three times each this one on the bottom I still haven't this problem only two times with this one of the bottom you can see the colors a little bit darker these right here I know I've got these at least four times and what I'm getting ready to do is melt some more wax today is the last batch of wax that I've I've got I had three more batches to do I've done two of them already they're already in the bucket starting to cool them get greater to melt the last one so what I'm gonna do is I'll go ahead and show you how I'm gonna melt this last one the kettles already heated up I'm just ready to drop them the old comb inside of it and when you get another batch done and what the video is going to be about is what I use this wax for it's gonna be something a little different but hopefully later on in the video of explaining it and you'll be able to follow along you get an understanding of what I use another thing that I used our wax board here up at the Abbey so that grace of God we're gonna get this a little job done today melt some more wax it'll take another few more days before we get this video out done but by this weekend it'll be finished let's go wranglin nelson wax huh so now we're inside the maintenance building looking at our kettle right here that's our next bag of wax that we're going to be jumping into the kettle then let me show you what I've already melted this morning they got this bucket right here and this bucket right here now we got two of them but tomorrow these things will be cooled down all three of them and we'll be able to render them one more time getting them to be about the same condition as those guys right there as you can see the kettles already heated up we're ready to have a wax dropped in so let's go ahead and drop it in there so with that wax dropped in you spread it out a little bit and as hot as this water is already and as fine as this watch there's a lot of chopped up wax in this one this one is not going to take long to melt at all we're gonna close the lid on this and I'm telling it it's it's only going to be ten ten minutes fifteen at tops and this stuff will be rendered down into one mass of course there's gonna be a lot of cocoons and stuff in there so we'll get all that stuff filtered out and when we do and we'll go ahead and drain it into our bucket and let it start cool alright that's good enough right now ten minutes ten minute time I'll just dig in check with we look like inside yeah Steve they're very very nice the fire turned off everything has broken down I got a different way of putting my screen in this time I actually roll the screen up this time and stick it inside of the nozzle instead of having it around the entire kettle I work that way this morning twice already and seemed to work really great and I'll fish some of this well most of this cocoon stuff out with a fish fry basket and it'll really help take that load off of the straining of the wax and water through this screen once I open up the gate let's go ahead and start skimming off these cocoons the next process I'm using this whole fish frying basket and what I do is I'll go through the kettle picking up a bunch of these crew cones and just letting that wax strain out of it just like they do when they're trying to French fries at McDonald's and then once I get a good bit of that wax out of there because you know I don't like to waste this stuff and I'm just gonna go ahead and dump it into my little tray right here onto the next batch this method is a little bit more labor intense but I think it cleans the wax a little bit better because I leave majority of this stuff in the kettle and a lot of the wax will come out of it instead of me losing it in the cocoons now that I got the majority of the big stuff out I'll use a smaller board to screen this stuff out that's all the screening that I need to do I know I didn't get it all out not a lot of it out but it's not necessary to get a lot of it out because by keeping this screen in here it's gonna prevent this the nasty stuff to getting inside of my wax and also it'll stay inside the kettle and it'll trap a lot of the dirt that way too so I'm going to go ahead and set up my little net over my my filter net over my bucket and we're going to open up the gate now as I open the gate you'll see the water level one and wax level decrease as well as all the trash start building up along the screen now I've removed the gate and just allowing the blacks now just to finish flowing out and you can see this is all wax that's floating out of this kettle now and there is still a lot of wax in here and because of our kettle is still hot very hot it'll it'll remain in that liquid state for at least 10-15 minutes and in that whole time that it's in that liquid state it'll just be easing out little by little our wax this is all the debris that I caught that screen inside that the neck of this cowl really is a great idea it worked really well and at this point I can remove my little screen right here because no more dirt is gonna come out it's gonna it's gonna be trapped inside so we'll take this off right now and as our wax continues to come out I'm gonna just go ahead and close the kettle let that heat stay in there a little bit longer and we'll get this thing done about 10 more minutes our wax ickle is growing pretty big now I mean is it's things are starting to cool down like let's go ahead look at inside of the kettle yeah it's all pretty much down to the end I'm not interested in getting any more because it's just gonna get dirty of the wax just get dirtier so we'll just call it quits on this one and we're gonna go ahead and close this one up that kettles all cleaned up now there's the wax that we just rented and we're set for tomorrow so we'll pick this video up tomorrow we're gonna re render this wax as well as these two right here this is all the debris that I took out of this batch this stuff makes excellent fire starter compost pile I mean a lot of a lot of good stuff for this other than the dumpster so we use it for a few things over here all right let's pick this video up to now here are three buckets with wax in it this one coming when I was moving these the water spilled over this one not so much but so what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna go ahead and dump these out and then scrape off the bottoms and go ahead and drop them back into the kettle and you can see there's some bees in that one there's one there too let's go ahead dump this stuff out and see what we're looking at here is that little pancakes not bad not great but not bad we're gonna melt these one more time and clean them up a little bit more I have to do before I do that clean throw them in a kettle again I gotta scrape this stuff off the bottom dirt off the bottom of these by scraping the bottom off you know help clean it up a little bit good enough let's go ahead bring them in to the kettle and start melting these guys down already got the water boiling well as you can tell cattle is all ready to go and this is the wax that we just finished doing I'm just gonna sit yeah get it cleaned up one more time I don't think it's gonna take but 15 to 20 minutes to get this stuff melted these aren't really big blocks get it melt it down strain it one more time let it cool and these guys will be ready for the next step we'll check back about 20 minutes or so it's already starting to melt [Music] the picture that our water was already boiling so as soon as that wax hit it it started to melt and you can see that yellow yellow coming out like I said it's not going to take long for these this these little blocks to melt down all right we're at about 10 minutes right now you were take and oh yeah we're done so I'm gonna put the strainer over the bucket right now open up the gate let the hot wax come out catch whatever trash is in there let it cool overnight [Music] [Music] Nasri didn't catch that much stuff it wasn't that much in a couple of bees it died when they got into that wax when I smelled it even in the finer it wasn't a lot down there that's good this this render and they'll come out really nice yeah looks okay to me we'll find out tomorrow what it looks like we'll take it out the bucket tomorrow I'll give you a shot what that looks like cleaning it up a little bit and that should be good enough with what we need to be doing afterwards we'll pick this up to go tomorrow it's been two days since I came out here and to look at this wax I had to work all day yesterday getting all these boxes moved up inside of here in preparation for what I'm coming to next but let's look at see what this looks like yeah it looks really really nice so this cover right here that was on top of the wax somebody had suggested on one of my videos that I should put cardboard or something over it to retain the heat so that way when it cools you wouldn't get any cracks in the surface and it worked really good that's a beautiful piece of wax so let's go ahead and shake this thing out of the bucket and see how much we got in there and what it looks like all right let's see what we got look at that that is a nice chunk of Wax now instead of those three little ones one beautiful one scrape this stuff off of here hey yeah I'll cleaned up that's very nice so I'm gonna just go ahead this is the pile that we've already got and let me show you something else too and here's all the wax all this wax I hadn't waited yet but I'm guessing this has got to be over 50 pounds of wax all this blacks oh this is a forgot when I took the original picture I forgot to put this block in these are the the cappings from our cappings it's all white that's why that's such a different color between this and all the rest of them listen Erica Kathleen's wax so but all this wax is gonna get melted again into our kettle and eventually it's going to be used to coat our frames like this one because it's got drawing that one up on it but all these other ones that don't have drawn in the phone so that's really going to be the next part of the video melting all this part all the wax down and then how I transfer the wax onto the frames so we're gonna pick this up tomorrow it's now Saturday morning March 18th I'm finally getting around it no thing all the wax well not all the wax this is only about 80 pounds of it that I've got in here right now all right we're gonna go ahead and melt all this wax down it's about quarter to 7:00 in the morning right now I don't know how long it's going to take for all that wax to get melted down but I guess we're gonna find out I'm hoping in about an hour and a half we should be all liquid again in this case we'll start doing our final step putting the wax on a tray so we're right about fifty minutes let's open her up and see what we're looking like oh man I'm really surprised that that wax it looks like it's all been melted already man that is really nice that is gorgeous nice all right so now to the nitty-gritty of what this video is all about so you see now I've melted the wax we had all that wax so what do you use the wax for what do I use a wax for and some of it is used in a can of production and making lotions in fact later on I am going to make a video on melting the cappings and what we do with that how they make the the lotions and the candles and that'll be down the road but for today what we're doing with this our wax days we're melting those blocks and you've already seen that I've got those things in the kettle and we're melting those those blocks to then put on our foundation so here's your frame with your plastic foundation in it plastic foundation I'm a great big fan of it mostly because when I put the frame of honey in my extractor and spin it out the comb stays on the frame I've had in the past where the comb blows out falls out just from that centrifugal force of the extractor but with a plastic foundation it will always stay on there the problem with plastic foundation bees don't want to build on it and if you just drop one of these frames with the plastic foundation on it into your box they might draw comb on it and it's no guarantee that they will in the comb that they draw on it often they build that comb off of the frame itself so there's a gap between the comb and the frame and that gap is absolutely terrible if you think you're going to try to spin that because that will blow off the frame as well so to encourage the bees to build on the plastic foundation as well as on the frame itself what we do is we coat it with wax what I do is I coat it with wax and for years I use my little crock pot right here and you can tell it has been very well used I would I would feel this proc pot up with enough wax and it would do 30 frames that's what it would take 30 frames to do one pot and how I would do it I put the wax in there melt it and then I'd use a roller a little foam roller dip the roller the wax the roller into the wax and that would simply roll it out onto the frame without the frame being there but just on the foundation I just roll it out onto the frame and it works it works really great if you have you know lesson like 20 hives or so you can do that but with as many hives as we have now that that way of doing it is just not efficient enough so I've come up with the help of other people this process of melting large quantities of wax suspending it in water and then dipping the frame into that suspended wax shaking it off and then that's how I'm coating the brains and quick backs now speaking of wax waxes is a very very very precious commodity for the bees and for us too because they only produce wax at certain times of the year at least my bees only produce wax at a certain time of year because I don't feed them if you feed your bees you can get them to produce wax pretty regularly but since I don't feed them there's only a very very small window of wax production and in that in that window you have to be ready for those bees if they have our equipment ready so that they will produce the wax for you it takes seven pounds of honey to produce 1 pound of wax so in my small way of thinking if I help the bees by giving them the wax on the frame that they don't have to produce that honey that they would have used to produce the wax will now be able to be stored inside the frames that they're going to be drawing out from the wax that I give them so for me it's it's a pretty simple choice give them the wax they give me the the honey I've got enough wax I think we can do this so the idea of me putting wax on the frames 11 having the bees draw that wax out to the comb it's a very very good fit for for me so what I've been doing for well it's been three days now I've been getting all these boxes behind me these are all the boxes that were in the peacock fence and peacock Hut been bringing them in here and I've been popping the frames out and it's it's really simple you just take the the frames and you push on it boom the foundation comes out and I've got all those boxes not only but few left to do and with the foundation out then I can take this foundation and then dip it into my wax suspended solution in a kettle so I think that's all I got them about about that oh one more thing if you're going to use your crock pot to to melt wax you know like I've done for years just a little point of interest once once wax touches anything it's it's never going to be used for anything for that purpose that it was originally designed for again so like crock pots you know I used to make my bake my bread beans in this all the time well you'll never make another red bean in this pot this pot is finished it's just for wax that's all so I'm gonna go ahead and start dipping our frames I got brother Austin here with me this morning he's coming to help me once again because it's a it's a big job so we're gonna go to start and hopefully by a couple hours we'll have all this job done so before we start I'm gonna show you the phrase that have already pulled out these are all the foundations that I've taken out of the frames and each one of these stacks is about 30 frames so you could imagine if I was doing this using my crock-pot how many hours of work it would take to do these frames now most of these frames were frames that were previously wax from when I bought these last year but since they sat out they dried up and this it's still some wax on them but because I want to really get these beads to have a good jump on the honey production I'm just worried if all of these they'll let them draw that out so let's go ahead and set up and dip some of these frames these foundations so first I'm gonna check to see if our wax blocks have all been melted oh yeah this it's all melted in there and those are some huge chunks of wax so there's no blocks and here's this stuff it's ready to go so what I'm gonna be doing is taking my frames [Music] pulling them this way and submerging them into the wax and then shaking that excess off because there's going to be a lot of excess those little cell pockets they hold a lot of the wax so you want to knock off most of it we put you leave plenty behind and then we're gonna cool this thing let's shake it off and cool it and then you'll see the wax as it gets on to it right look at this Wow and this is just right out of there it's not even finished cooling off so there's still parts that are wet but you can't see it [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah hey just finish dip in the last frame actually I was ten frames short of dipping all them because I'm out of wax in here now back let me grab the camera I'm gonna show you how little wax is floating on on that water right now now it may appear that there's a lot of wax in here but as I brush the the wax off of the surface of the water you can see it's like ten thousandths of an inch layer of wax and there's so little wax in there it's not even getting on my screen so I almost got all those frames done and I think we used close to 80 pounds of wax today and I will count how many frames it was but it was a lot of friends give you a shot of our last batch of frames coming out of the tank and they just sit out here to dry cool off not drive the cool off those are the ten frames that I ran out of wax before getting to it was a long day today and but it worked everything worked really great the cattle weren't good for the dipping of the waxes the first time I ever did it like this and and I'm very happy with it did four hundred and sixty frames is how many did I got forty six boxes that I've done I still have about eight more boxes that I still have to pop the frames in but look at the look at these frames a man look at the blacks and stuff I mean that is like beautiful beautiful these bees they're gonna have made when they when they start pulling this down though so I'm gonna I'll probably another week or so when I go out there and set these out there give it another week and do it follow up on how they drawn this comb l cuz I want to see myself that's all I got for you this one thanks for watching keep on watching I'll be baking god bless mr. head I'm outie until the next video [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Jeff Horchoff Bees

Views: 281,757

Rating: 4.9265022 out of 5

Keywords: Rendering old bee's wax making it useful once again, rendering bee's wax, uses for bees wax, brood comb, honey comb, wax moths, plastic foundation, wax fooundation, bee hive frames, wooden frames with plastic foundation, hot wax, filtering bee's wax, bee's wax candles, using bee's wax for lotions, dipping plastic foundation into bee's wax, honey production, hive tools, old bee's wax, McDonald's french fries, wax melter, steam kettle, fire starter sticks, compost material

Id: 2m3szKoqxzM

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020