22 September 2016

Cleaning beeswax



 I LOVE having bees on site. They are amazing creatures. They pollenate my vegetables, fruits, and flowers. All for the sake of making beautiful amber honey for themselves- that I steal. HA! You can see some of my butternut squash that I've over wintered here in this first photo as well. So yummy.

So what do you do with the weird over growths of burr comb? I had to scrape a lot off when I put my packages in and they went crazy before I got another box on. I used quite a lot of it when I caught a swarm this summer. I rub the beeswax on empty frames so that the bees can get going faster and just move the wax around. It's worth it. 



I put a folded over piece of (market) cheesecloth into my double boiler. All the junk stays in the cheese cloth and most* of the wax will leak through. I think I will try another method for getting the beeswax next year though. This works, but it takes awhile.











When I poured the liquid in the silicone trays I noticed it was an odd color. I let them cool and it separated the wax to the top and the pollen on the bottom. So, now I have a bit of pollen in this as well. I poured the pollen into an old salsa jar and froze it to use in the spring for the bees to get started into brooding faster.





I'm going to use this to make some cosmetics later, so look for those posts at a later date. Zero Waste cosmetics, well as close as I can get to it anyways. One step at a time towards a better life!