Wax and Winter

Mostly in the winter I fool around with wax. I should be cleaning frames (or better yet, my basement), but instead, I find myself rustling up a batch of soap or making lip balm. Wax is my winter friend.

I just bought ripe avocados to make a soap recipe that the Soap Queen mentioned and must make it tonight or tomorrow while the avocado is not over-ripe.

Just to pique my curiosity, on the GBA Facebook page today, there is a link to an article about 17 uses of beeswax. I visited the page, of course, and just had to comment on her article. It is really good and includes wonderful, helpful links to pages and pages of adventures with beeswax.

Interestingly, she did not include soap making. Jeff and I are dedicated to putting beeswax into every soap we make. I changed the avocado soap recipe to include some beeswax. That's what lye calculators are for, you know! Here are two: Brambleberry's calculator and Majestic Mountain Sage's calculator. As any of you who make soap know, even recipes you find on the Internet should be run through a lye calculator before you make them and certainly if you change the recipe up at all, you should put it through one as well.

Speaking of recipes on the Internet, I plan to create a section on this blog for soap recipes, as someone asked for in a blogpost comment.

Fun and Facts about Wax

Last week I was the speaker at my local bee club meeting.  I have given lots of talks and wanted to try something different so I talked about Fun and Facts about Wax!  I covered a lot of facts about wax and then talked about melting it, employing it in making candles, lip balm, lotion, swarm lure, etc., and ended with enjoying it.

I am giving the same talk at the Potato Creek Beekeepers Club in Griffin, GA on Thursday, November 20 at 7 PM - here's where they meet in case any of you are in the area and want to come:
Spalding County Extension Office, located at 835 Memorial Dr., Griffin, GA 30224

A few fun facts that I had such fun collecting!

• Wax has been found in shipwrecks that is extremely old and still is a lovely product
• Beeswax has always been valued because it burns slowly and without smoke
• Back in 181 BC (a long, long, long time ago) the Romans conquered the Corsicans and then taxed the Corsicans 100,000 pounds of beeswax a year
• Like honey from China is contaminated with things other than honey, wax in ancient times was often extended with things like sand so guilds developed to protect the purity of the product.  Some of those guilds are still in existence today
• One pound of beeswax supports 22 pounds of honey - that means that in a medium ten frame box, which full of honey holds about 40 pounds (4 pounds/frame), the amount of beeswax in that same box would be a little less than 2 pounds.

I could go on and on.....so many fun facts to learn about wax.  

Of course one of the most important facts about wax is that if you are not going to use it right away, don't let the wax moths have a feast.  Store it in your freezer!

I get asked a lot to give talks but this was a particularly fun one - I think because often I am talking about topics that get controversial reactions - like foundationless frames, crush and strain honey harvesting, simple beekeeping.  

This topic was universally accepted and I think everyone there enjoyed the talk - or at least a lot of people came up afterward to tell me they did.

Potato Creek is a new bee club which I am proud to support.  GBA has a number of new bee clubs and this one was just welcomed into GBA at the fall meeting.  So if you are around, come to the meeting on November 20 and hear my talk about Fun and Facts about Wax!

(Bear Kelley, president of the Georgia Beekeepers Association and 2014 Beekeeper of the Year, is the speaker in October:  On the 16th)

Laib Wax Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC

In the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, there is a room that is completely walled in beeswax.  Done by Wolfgang Laib (you can see the installation here), the room is illuminated by a single light bulb.

Here I am in the actual room.

It was installed as a permanent display at the Phillips Collection a little over a year ago and ever since I heard about it, I have wanted to go.  I am in DC (with my daughter Valerie) to visit my daughter, Becky, who lives here.

The room smells fabulous - like being inside a honeycomb of a bee hive.  My two daughters who are here too are in the photo below:

Laib apparently has done these all over the world.  He really wanted to install one at the Phillips Collection because he loved the impact of the Rothko room there.

I will always remember the smell.