Neils
Wax on....
by
, 03-10-2010 at 10:28 PM (4485 Views)
So I've nearly finished fiddling with the stuff I've taken off the hives this year. The mead continues to bubble away, there remains two buckets of honey still needing putting into jars and my labels still aren't done, but I have now converted the big bucket of cappings and the odd disintegrated super frame into blocks:
Somehow it doesn't seem an awful lot of wax anymore as a lot of the weight turned out to be water. Live and learn as they say.
The better half donated some (clean) tights to the cause, but they turned out to be far from useful at removing much but the larger bits of bee and other detritus from the wax. Far more effective was an offcut of the fine filter I used on the honey.
In the end I used the original food bucket containing the cappings/scraps to do the initial melting, then strained the wax through the filter into an old ice cream tub and from there straight into the moulds which I left to cool enough to solidify on the top and then stuck them in the fridge for half an hour or so before knocking them out again.
Compared to honey extracting I find this far more satisfying in some respects and certainly far less messy.