Liquid Gold

Success!

Being that I have this week off I am running out of things to do, besides the finishing touches on my deck. I did a little bit of work on it today, honest! I decided to finish processing my beeswax. Yesterday I had gotten it into a semi refined state, but it still had a large portion of debris in it though. Today I would use my wife's beat up old panty hose to finish the job.

I started by taking my wax disc and putting in in a pot with a large portion of water. I brought the mixture to a boil and as it was coming to a boil I set up my filtering apparatus. It was very fancy.


As soon as the wax started to boil I began to pour it through the filter. As the first bit of liquid hit my trampoline tight panty hose it decided to take a flying bum drop leap onto the kitchen floor, oddly enough it was at this exact moment that I remembered a quote from the website in which I took this filtering method from. "I do this outside. Wax is also a bear to get off of your kitchen floor and it's not something you can easily hide from your husband/wife."


No real harm done, just 10 minutes of scraping wax off the floor with a old plastic gift card. As an added bonus that section of the floor is now nicely smooth and waxed. I removed the panty hose containing what is known as "slumgum" and tossed it into the garbage, although I hear if you spread it out on some newspaper and let it dry it makes a great fire starting material.


Below lay a cloudy miso soup type liquid that I placed in the garage to harden.


A few hours later I retrieved it and was astounded by the purity, liquid gold indeed. Now I'm not entirely sure what decides how dark wax will be, if it's related to the species of bee or the age of the wax but my disc is a brilliant yellow.


I haven't decided what I'm going to do with this wax yet, it seems almost a shame to use it on my wooden frames because of the effort I went through to filter it. I have found a lip balm recipe though, so I may give that a try.