Melting Wax Saved from 2015
This weekend I started melting and cleaning the wax that I've collected from the 2015 beekeeping year.
Most of it was nice clean wax cappings collected after extracting honey from the frames, some of it was burr comb collected during inspections during the year.
I've documented the process I use to melt wax in a crock pot before, which if interested, you can read about here.
Here's what the bags of wax looked like before I put them into the crock pot. They were frozen solid in the deep freezer to keep them from fermenting with all the honey drippings in them.
After a few hours in the crock pot, turned on low, the wax was finally melted.
Then after pouring through the layers of cheese cloth, the wax came out nice and yellow, leaving behind the slum gum on the cheesecloth screen.
It still had a few spots that had honey and other impurities in them, so I melted it down twice more: once into another bucket of water, and a final time into smaller containers that I can easily use to to make candles, lotions and lip balm.
Each of these flower molds in the silicone mold creates a 1/2 oz bar of wax.
The wax I processed today was right around 2 lbs and 1 oz. Not shown here is another circular wax block, still cooling at the time of the photo, and thus not shown.
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