Today I'm taking the cappings from the crush-and-strain harvest I did to fill the chunk honey jars and trying to see if my solar wax melter works.
Some of you may remember that I built the solar wax melter last year, but didn't do it until October when it wasn't hot enough long enough in the day. The outside temperature needs to be at 79 for most of the day to make it work.
Today the high is supposed to be 92, and when I put the box out at 9:15, the temperature was 76 and rising. We'll see. I'll report back later and let you know if it worked this time.
As you will see from the slideshow, it worked just great! I wish I had left it alone until after dark. When I removed the paper towel, melted wax that hadn't filtered through it yet poured onto my counter and I would have saved that mess if I had waited. I pulled it indoors at 4 PM and the results were gorgeous as you'll see in the slide show. I can't wait to use it again, with my new lessons learned from today's first trial.
The pictures below will play as a slideshow, but if you click on the picture, you can go to the album itself which has captions explaining the pictures.
Linda,
ReplyDeleteI am so grateful for this information because I was wondering what to do with the wax capping I was saving and thought it would cost me more money to purchase a melter.
Even I can do this!!
By the way I am also a Sagittarius, birthday November 30, 1951
Thank you so much for your wonderful posts.
Annette
Linda, this is Reinbeau from Beemaster. That is great! I'm going to have to try that next summer - of course it'll have to be high summer around here to have any hope of it working. Nice slide show!
ReplyDeleteDo you notice that the paper towel wicks the wax and drips it on the bottom of the cooler?
ReplyDeleteI've had to pull the container out and pour the wax out of the cooler bottom and put it in the container.
Hi Linda,
ReplyDeleteThe solar melter works great. But, what is the darker stuff left on top? Is it propalis? I'm only melting comb from supers so there is no brood comb.
Andy
The darker stuff left on top is called "slumgum" It is made up of nonwax stuff in the wax - like bee parts, SHBs that may have gotten crushed with the crush and strain, etc. It gets dark because it gets so hot in the solar wax melter that it in essence burns up.
ReplyDelete