None of Your Beeswax – My Conclusion on Rendering Wax from Comb

So a few weeks back I wrote a post titled, Rendering Beeswax. And it did pretty good for itself too. I sort of left the project ½ way complete with a bag of comb waiting for me to render it in the greenhouse. I finally got back to the job though and wanted to share some new conclusions I found about the rendering process. Often times what you read on someone else’s blog works differently for you. Such was the case for me.

The first step that I did in the previous post was to break up the comb and soak it in water. By the end I was skipping this step. I just felt like it was causing me to loose wax I didn’t need to be losing and it didn’t exactly do that good of a job at cleaning out the loose bee parts. Plus clean-up is a bitch and not having another bowl to scrub out is a plus in my eyes.
Step 2 was stuffing as much comb into a doubled up stocking as you can. It would suck if the stocking ripped but again, I got lazy and was just using one stocking by the end rather than 2. I guess it’s your preference but I didn’t have a problem with stockings ripping.

Alright so here’s where I started doing things really different.

The blog post I originally followed said to line your crockpot in plastic bags like this…

This was way more of a pain in the ass then just giving the crockpot a good cleaning when you’re done. Don’t use the bag its gross and melty and you don’t get a pretty result like this:

When you’re done with a batch! I mean having a nice big moon of wax is so much more satisfying then a bunch of chips. I ended up melting down all the little chunks I got from the first few batches I did with the bag and making them into a moon too ( :

Alright so skip the first step of soaking, don’t use a bag to line your pot, and finally press out those stockings! The blog I followed said not to do this but what a WASTE! For my first few batches I didn’t press out the stockings. The worry I guess is that you’ll get contaminants or something… I’m making this for me and family and friends not for some commercial production so I don’t really think I found a problem with contamination from left over bug parts or whatever the blogger was worried about. But I did find that there was a lot of wasted wax!

Pressing out the stocking gave me a nice thick round of wax and a mostly empty stocking except for the expected gross scraps that stay in the stocking because they’re too big to fit through (the whole point of the stocking right?) On the other hand if I didn’t press out the stocking with a fork or spoon I got a much thinner disk of wax and a unsatisfactorily full stocking. I mean I want to use that stuff up!

Here’s a picture of what I’m talking about…

That’s a thin one verse the previous thick one that I got from pressing the stockings out.
After all was said and done I got three nice disks of beautiful yellow and lovely smelling wax.

Beauties huh!?

It’s nothing near the poundage I had when I scrapped out the hive. I blame it on not pressing the first 6+ batches that I did and on the fact that I left the combs to sit in the greenhouse and didn’t get around to finishing the project until some weeks later. I found out unpleasantly that the combs in one of the bags got wet and molded… ugh such a bummer. At least I’ve got a good compost pile.

I will certainly be letting you all in on the projects I do with this wax… which oughta happen soon since Christmas is coming up ASAP!

Hope you gained some valuable info from this. Sometimes you’ve gotta make mistakes to figure out what works best. Hopefully my mistakes can save you the hassle ( :

CHEERS!