Rendering Wet Wax Cappings With my Finlay Wax Melter, Salvaged 8 Pails of Honey!

beekeeping buddy of mine got ahold of me the other day and he's got about 100 hives hundred fifty hives and he had a really good honey year and he produced a lot of wax and his extracting system like he's he's a growing operator and his extracting system worked fantastic except he didn't have the facility to be able to extract the honey from the wax he was producing you know common story from most beekeepers as we're growing we we invest into the capacity of extraction but we don't have any you know real efficient way of getting that honey out of the wax so he had this problem he didn't know what to do with it his tub strainer wasn't keeping up to all the honey that was left in the lock so it wasn't straining out he ended up putting a bunch into a bunch of pails here so I offered to amazing hey I got this wax melter let me take that honey wax off your hands and let's see if I can sell which is a little bit honey from you and then I'll melt the wax at the end I just happened to be in to Winnipeg Manitoba Beekeepers Association meeting so we met up outside after the meeting and transferred the pails of honey into my SUV here and I'm going to test out this melter and see if I can extract some less honey without damaging it just to see how much I can salvage and then I want to see how much honey I can extract through the melt process to see how I can how much I can get back without darkening it so it's going to be an interesting little project in my situation I don't have a lot of waste honey in my wax because I use the wax spinner and the wax that falls from that spinner is typically a little bit higher with water just because there's water in the knives so I'm not too concerned on salvaging honey as I process the walks so it's going to be interesting to see how much honey I can salvage for this guy and then maybe you know maybe this could be an option for him to invest further down the line to help him recapture some that honey of the walks and the added benefit is he just happens to be really good at making Mead so sandy and I will tap into this tonight and I'll get into his honey wax processing tomorrow [Music] so one of the 12 panels that I got for my neighborhood beekeeper I have about 10 in here now and there's quite a bit of money in these pails as I was saying he had a pretty big crop this year and I couldn't keep up to straining to be wax out of the honey so we ended up just talking bales and putting it to the side and he didn't know what to do it can see it's pretty wet here and it seems to be he just like a lot of beekeepers as we're growing the put all our attention towards our extraction capacity and we don't put a lot of tension towards our you rendering the wax and the honey in the wax is something we don't appreciate it until further down the line when we invest into proper locks equipment and we realized how much honey that we're leaving on the table and it's quite significant so I'm always trying to suggest to beekeepers as they grow that try to put as much attention towards extracting the honey in your wax as they do your extraction process because there's a lot of salvage honey that can be capitalized on and it doesn't take much to have so anyways that's the situation he's in that I'm going to set this melter now at about 50 degrees not hot enough to scorch the honey just enough to keep this batch warm and just to help you know drop that honey to this melter and then I'm gonna tap it off so I'm gonna give that about 12 hours or so I don't want to spend too much time at this I'll tap off that top end honey that's late honey I'll put it in my light pale and then I'll up this temperature to about 75 degrees and I'll get a nice melt of the rocks and the honey and I would start layering itself and then I'll be able to tap off the rest of the honey and that will be dark and a little bit because the heat treatment and I'll put that in the second tale so I'll be my medium pale and after I'm tapping off all the honey I'll crank this unit up to 90 degrees and when it's up at 90 it'll all be it'll mark itself to the point where I can afford the wax so I'll tap off the last part of the honey off that that'll be the dark not sure what he'll do with that but they'll be in the dark honey and then I will part the wax press out the slump and then it'll be done he'll have pale a tiny little pale darker honey and media money the appellant pale melter you'll have wax blocks that I'm going to send him this month back to so this in quick fit so I've appeal so it's next morning now the cappings are sitting at 49 degrees and I'm just tapping off some honey that has accumulated at the bottom of tank so I won't know how much has actually settled down to the bottom until I finished tapping this out I'm probably gonna top out what I can now I'm not gonna strain that I'll leave that up to him I'm gonna tap it until I get start getting cappings of the pad below and then let it sit for probably the rest of the day and then do the same see how much honey I can get out of this tank before I set the temperature up to melt out the wax so this is the second night I've let this tank sit yesterday I tapped off four pails I'm working on the fifth this morning this is still the honey that is sitting at 50 55 degrees or so I upped it to 55 degrees just to help draw up the honey down a little quicker and it's separating very nicely right now so after I top off whatever honey I can get out here I'm going to up to temperature up to 75 degrees just start melting the wax to further separate the honey in the wax and define those layers if I had more time I would let this sit for another night and maybe salvage more honey but believe this will be five pills we'll see how much we get here so he was absolutely astounded that I was able to get four pails of honey cut of all this honey wax you know if you look at that honey wax hitting the pail doesn't look like a lot but there's a terrible mud honey that's residing in that wax capping and here I'm working on the sixth Taylor you know so I think he is thinking more seriously about acquiring some kind of mechanism to get this honey out of his wife because this this is costing him a lot this is a lot of money left on the table which will now be put directly into his revenue so he's actually thinking about buying a unit like this a unit like this or maybe the smaller unit that's available also and it for one thing it give him a place to put his cappings while he's extracting just throw it in this the melter let it kind of drain out or just leave it till the end of the season and tap it off like this then you could also render his wax and have a complete process so here I'm just starting to get into some cappings now with body so just the boat tapped out honey from the settled honey the layered honey from the tank here here some captains now what cappings so that is six pails so the second pails I'm going to tap off here are gonna be marked as medium pails so they've the honey in that will have experienced heat treatment to both 75 degrees only for about six hours or so so I'll tap off that honey and then I'll crank it right up to 90 degrees and get a real solid melt to enable myself to pour the wax that any honey that comes out of that will be put into my dark pail like the dark veil is the the melter honey pail I'm not sure what he'll do that maybe make some barbecue sauce or something and then pour his wax and then cook out this long so I set my high temperature to 75 degrees they set my low temperature to 72 degrees to cell cycles between three degrees here so that should be a good solid melt this afternoon so it's at 72 degrees right now and this is about four hours after I increase the temperature I'm just pouring out the honey so we're getting a lot more honey separation out of the tank and the honey's it's a little bit darker now it's at 70 to 75 degrees it hasn't been sitting long so this will be going into my medium pale now and the wax I've turned it up to 90 now I'm gonna cook this wax get ready to pour for tomorrow so the tank has been sitting overnight at 90 degrees so I have a real good melt on that wax now and it is pretty much turned this honey black so this is melter honey not sure what he's gonna do with this but I'm gonna send it back to him anyways I don't know he might be able to find a place to sell it or maybe make some barbecue sauce out of it there's not gonna be much of this so I'm just gonna tack this down until I hit this wax layer and a good way to determine when D hit the watch Larry's just take your high of tool and just dip it in and you can see the wax kind of harden on your 1/5 tool so I've obviously tapped into the the wax layer right now so this is all the melter honey he'll get I let him deal with it [Music] and you can really smell Beltre honeybees very distinctive it's burnt it's burnt honey was what it is so there we go he has six pails of lightning he has two tales of medium honey and then just you know quarter pail of dark melter hood so now we're going to tap the wax off I just want to use a strainer I handles broke about this one but I use a strainer just to catch as long as it comes through so now we're into the wax and as we get into this wax layer we're gonna fall into we're gonna get start getting that slum come through so that's why I use this strainer to catch that slump as you can see poor the wax suit so as we pour the wax and I called this panning of the wax so I dumped it into a pan like this out of the melter and then we just slowly pour it into the mold and we're watching for the settled honey layer in the bottom was 10 and this pore will get the wax pretty clean you just keep pouring out the layers so you take the wax layer from the melter tank pull out the slum and then pour it into the pan [Music] so as you're pouring with the pan here you notice as you get to the bottom of the pan there's a honey layer so you're just gonna pour the wax until you get to the honey layer so we don't worry too much about that how much why honey because it's going to be going back into the Melchor great away anyways as we cook out the slum so now in the bottom of the pan we just have a small little layer of honey they were just starting to get into the heavy swamp pour as much wax if you can hear the tank is because this is easy pour wise we're not gonna spend too much time trying to you know settle out the wax because we're going to cook the slum right away here so I'm gonna go through the full process so about 140 pounds of wax that's pretty good and we're just gonna cook out the slum now as you can see the slump is settled to the bottom and it's pretty wet we're not gonna strain it off too much we can what I could do is just push this limb up to the top end and let more of it settle but we're gonna cook the slow mode anyways so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna fill this up with hot water and there's a tap on the side I'm gonna fill it up halfway up the tap [Applause] and we use a screen you slowly push a slim down into what the screen does is it pushes the slum down into the water and it holds the slum down into the water bath and as it cooks for the next 12 hours to the next 24 hours the wax is going to separate from the slum through the screen and float on top of the water so I have to slum down into the water layer now and then capita will be back in 12 to 24 hours [Applause] [Music] [Music] so I've all the water tapped out and now we are just left with the actual slum it was just like a soft powdery cake nothing to it whatsoever no wax no residue that is that so that finishes up this video project out of the wet capping she sent me he sent me 12 pails and I was able to recapture six pails of light honey and then as I increased the temperature I got to further pails and medium honey and then maybe a third of a pail melter honey I finished off by tapping off about 150 pounds of wax and yeah next time I see him I'll take this back to him and I'm hoping to maybe get another bottle of meat out of this

Channel: a Canadian Beekeeper’s Blog

Views: 317,781

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Id: HSNq7U3fnds

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019