Using the Solar Wax Melter

Large combs like the brood combs I rendered in the stew pot can't be easily put in my solar wax melter. The solar wax melter works best with clumps of wax from a honey harvest that is tender and malleable. The wax that I rendered is discolored, not tender, and doesn't smell sweet like wax from a harvest.

I took the cylinder of wax and broke it up today to melt in the solar wax melter. I thought it would filter more of the impurities out than the flannel pillow case did. I ended up with two stacks of wax pieces and put them in my two solar wax melter styrofoam boxes.





I set the two solar wax melters on my front walk in the full sun and left for work.



This is the wax under the glass, stacked to melt and filter through the paper towel.



At the end of the day, the slum gum was burned into the paper towel filter and wax was floating on the water's surface in the Tupperware container.

Removing the paper towel, I found cleaner wax that was still darker than the wax cappings that I usually use or the honey-filled honey comb that I use after harvest.












Here's the wax popped out of the Tupperware.  The sad part is that it doesn't smell nice like most of my solar wax melted wax does.  However, I have a horrible summer cold, so maybe I'm just not smelling as well as usual.

It bleaches out a little every time it is in the solar wax melter and in addition, more impurities will filter out.  I'm inclined to put these pieces back in the solar wax melter tomorrow.

After a second trip through the solar wax melter, the wax isn't much lighter, so I'll probably stop fooling with it.  This is now a disk about an inch thick, including both of the other wax pieces from yesterday's melting.

The peeled wax pieces at the upper left are the result of wax melting and dripping off of the paper towel filter onto the aluminum foil below.  In addition to helping with the interior heat, the aluminum foil offers an easy way to peel up wax that does this.

I haven't rendered wax from brood combs before.  I imagine it is always darker in the end than wax from a crush and strain honey harvest.

Pittsburgh Company Helps the Oil Spill with BEESWAX!

The naturebee listserv I subscribe to posted this link to a news item from about a company in Pittsburgh.

The environmentally friendly "boom" they produce is being used in the Gulf to contain the oil.  The boom actually uses beeswax as its ingredient.  In the process the oil disappears!

The company can't keep up with the demand.  I am wondering where they get their beeswax.  There's no mention of an apiary behind the factory.  Be sure to watch the video on the right of the screen.

Here's the link.

Bees and Wax Glands

Noah, Julia's son, has claimed their top bar hive as his own. He was looking in his hive yesterday and actually saw the bees with wax coming from their wax glands on their abdomen. You can really see the wax on the bee in the center of the first picture (thanks, Julia).



Below although the picture is fuzzy, you can again see wax flakes coming from the bees abdomen where the wax glands are located!



The bees take the wax flakes and mold them with their mandibles to make honeycomb.

Making Wax in the Bee Hive

The bees make wax by secreting wax from glands in their abdomen. They join together in festoons as they join the secretions. The bees in the picture below are stretched across the two frames I have separated with my hive tool as they are interrupted by me in the middle of their wax creation.



Look at the beauty of brand new wax. It is so white and clean. They typically do this - make three sections of comb in the frame - and then seamlessly join the three sections to fill the frame.

In the picture below, if you click to enlarge it, you can see that the edges of the wax cells remain somewhat rough. The cell isn't completed, whether it is used for brood or honey storage, until it is capped. Probably it doesn't matter to the bees if the edges are straight or not, since the capping will smooth over the edges.


At Blue Heron today, I found the bees in the third hive still making crooked comb. I cut out one piece that also included some honey. I set it on the hive beside the one I was inspecting. I saw this bee sticking her long tongue in the honey so as not to lose it! If you click to enlarge the picture you can see her long tongue down in the cell.

Inspecting and Festooning

Since we are in the middle of the 2009 honey flow, I keep a close watch on my hives over the next two months to make sure they have boxes when they need them. Today I did a 30 minute inspection of the four hives on my deck and found good work going on there.

In the tiny swarm nuc, they still weren't building up in the second five frame medium box, but they had begun to store honey in the bottom box. Here's an example. At the lower right of the picture, I've drawn a square around a small hive beetle, calmly living in the hive.



In Aristaeus2, I found the bees working in the top box, festooning as they build wax. A post on Beemaster right now deals with the feeling some beekeepers have of intruding on something private when you find the bees festooning.

I feel like the beekeepers who posted there - when I find festooning, the bees immediately take action to stop what they were doing. It feels like I have invaded their privacy and I want to leave them in peace. But before I left, I shot this picture. It's not the best festooning picture but you can see how the bees hang in a thread as they create wax.


The picture below shows you how the bees first draw comb in a foundationless frame. They usually make these three startup combs and over time they fill out the frame entirely. You can't delineate these three starter parts when the frame is fully drawn. It's amazing to me that they can do this.



In this frame you can see how they took the frame and built it entirely out before storing nectar in it. If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see that the next frame in the box is built out the same way. They have just started work on this box in this hive. Only a few days ago there was NO wax in this box - just empty frames.

Beeswax and waterproofing

Someone posted the question on the Beemaster Forum about how to use beeswax to make a waterproofer for leather boots.

Michael Bush, my beekeeping hero, said that he melts equal parts of vaseline and beeswax and puts it on warm boots to make them waterproof.

At the moment my boots are not leather ones - they're hiking boots that are Gortex, but I might try this on a pair of leather walking shoes that I like to use rain or shine!