Raw Beeswax use

[fleener]

I am a bee keeper. Solar melter works well and the wax is fairly clean. The water method does not work well for me.

Cheese cloth does a good job of catching the crud in a solar melter

No worries about the honey if the wax looks clean, most likely it is.

Fleener

 

[Eutycus]

This has been a very interesting thread. We have a local Amish Community near by and I may be able to get my hands on some raw beeswax as well.

 

[Nyckname]

This has been a very interesting thread. We have a local Amish Community near by and I may be able to get my hands on some raw beeswax as well.

Or you can put a hive in the backyard.

You can order a queen online. A quick look on Google shows they're less'n forty dollars.

 

[Ames]

Or you can put a hive in the backyard.

You can order a queen online. A quick look on Google shows they're less'n forty dollars.

It takes a bit more planning than that. The queens for sale right now are for re-queening a hive in preparation for next spring.
$40 for the queen, $125 for a spring package to start with a southern queen (kill her), $250 for the hive components, meds, food, a second hive so you understand just how bad the first hive is failing by comparison.....
Starting with two hives you should budget $800 plus. If you don't want to invest it, stick to buying beeswax at $10 a lb. from those who did.
My 9 hives (3 full, 6 splits) will finish with over 300 lbs of honey and comb for me this year, but only 3 lbs of wax from the cappings cut off the honey.

 

[Eutycus]

Or you can put a hive in the backyard.

You can order a queen online. A quick look on Google shows they're less'n forty dollars.

I think I'll stick with the raw beeswax. Sister in law with her grandkids live in a camper behind my garage. Those kids and a beehive? Haha

 

[Jay Templin]

A couple of years ago a buddy of mine was gifted about 20 pounds of hive cap wax and asked if I wanted it. My Bride and I soaked it to remove the honey, then packed it into dollar store pantyhose (and didn't I just get some looks when I was buying 6 pairs!) and chucked them into our old crockpot with a gallon of water. The wax melted and passed through the hose, leaving the bee bits behind. We skimmed some of the wax off, but the rest we let cool and just pulled the sheet off the top. Virtually no effort.
Jay

 

[Artificer]

Maybe 15 or more years ago at the State Fair, before the Richmond Raceway bought the old Fairgrounds, I asked a beekeeper about buying beeswax in bulk. He was selling little "Sticks" of it all nice and clean. He informed me if I didn't mind it being truly "raw," he would sell it very cheap to me. I got a big block of it for next to nothing, but it barely resembled bees wax. It was almost black with dross and legs and wings throughout.

I broke chunks off with a chisel and mallet.

I already knew to use a double boiler to heat it up and bought a cheap food strainer with a handle to strain out the dross/legs/wings/etc. For smaller batches, I heat it in a Pyrex measuring cup in the microwave before straining.

I already had an old cup cake pan I had used for casting large quantities of lead into small handy sizes, so I used that to make a few beeswax cakes for waxing linen thread to sew leather.

I used more to make a 1:1:1 ratio of beeswax to turpentine to BLO mixture, which is an old to almost ancient finish for wood hand tools and some people use it on gun stocks.

Going to try making some Coad someday, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Surprisingly, I still have about half the huge block of raw beeswax to this day. Yet I've already gotten many times what I paid for it and even considering my time, the price was definitely right.

Gus

 

[Smokey Plainsman]

Ohmagosh, so useful.

I use a bee’s wax for everything from sealing and waterproofing natural coordages, to finishing rammers, coating metal, knive’s blades, bullet’s lubes, you name it. Bee’s wax is excellent!