My troubles with wax

Greetings once again readers. Forgive me for the long period since the last post, I have been busy building our new deck after my weeks of backyard preparation.

The weather for the past few weeks has been pretty lousy and the forecast for the upcoming weeks isn't looking to great either. It seems that fall is finally upon us, barring any freak heat waves. I did do a quick check-in on the bees last week to see how they were managing. I'm happy to say they've started working on filling the 3rd box with honey but I don't think there will be enough nectar to finish the job. There aren't any major flowering crops at this time so they'll only be foraging on what little blooming plants they can find. I'll have to start feeding them so they can build up enough stores for winter. The forecast is looking good for tomorrow so I'll be heading out to do a full inspection to make sure they are free of disease and pests. The last thing you need is a hive weakened by those issues going into winter.

Today I decided to try and get my two buckets of burr comb refined down into some liquid gold. I'm not sure how much I'll get, but I need to free my buckets up so I can use them to collect more burr comb in the future. Having talked to my instructor from the beekeeping course on various ways in how to go about melting the wax, I started off by getting all the comb into my pot in a double boiler setup.


This appeared to be going well, but there wasn't enough heat to completely melt all the wax, it was hardening up on the last piece of comb I put in the pot forming a wax ice burg. All other sources I've read said you need to get a water and wax mixture boiling so I threw out the double boiler idea and put the pot directly on the stove and added some of the boiling water.


As soon as it began boiling I realized that I had an issue. I don't have any other metal vessels into which I can strain the large debris out of the wax, oh sure, I could have used one of our nice cooking pots but not if I wanted to sleep in a cozy bed tonight.

I've decided I'll just put the mixture out in my garage for the night to see how well it separates and hardens on it's own. I may have to melt it down again to strain it but I don't have any plans on using it for candles or beauty products so if it's not 100% clean it's not a big deal. I'll post a picture tomorrow of how well the separation went. In the mean time I'm off to the Good Will store to see if I can get some cheap metal vessels.