Extracting Bees Wax From Honey Combs!!! Step 1.

Hey everyone, one of the great things about been involved with bee-keeping other than the spectacular honey that you get, is the wax one can extract from the combs.

This process is rather intensive and lengthy but beeswax does retail for up to 3 times the cost of honey can you believe that?

With all our feral swarm rescues we have quiet a large amount of feral combs. We initially thought we would store them for food for the bees in winter but sadly they got infested with wax moth and maggots. Quiet alot of honey to waste which was rather sad, but all was not lost.

I put everything into three large cast iron pots, we call these 'Potjie Pots' in South Africa. They last for years and are great for cooking what we call 'Potjiekos' or Stew to the rest of us on a braai (BBQ) I however had different plans for these pots as you can see.

I used my old faithful E-Scooter to collect wood for the fire next door. I currently don't have a car (invested it all in crypto) so this is how I get around for now. It still beats walking and makes for nice content too ;)

I also did not till now have an area designated to braai. My landlord/partner is pretty cool so gave me a piece of chromadeck and said make it right here, which is what I did.

I added all the combs, rotten honey, maggots, wax moth larvae and whatever else was in these combs I then added water and put to boil.

The stench was incredible, I almost puked a few times, but as it boiled off became more bearable.

This is quiet a time consuming task so will look to build a solar heater in future but for now and testing this extraction technique an open wood fire seems to work well.

The combs slowly melt as the water boils. I boiled this concoction for about an hour put the fire out and left to settle and cool.

As it cools the lighter wax floats with all the other 'nasties' the next step from here is to let it totally cool off over night and do the process again in the morning.

This time however what I will do is take the top centimeter of wax off and throw the other garbage away. Boil again and repeat.

That nice bright yellow color is pure beeswax. Nice color and interesting a process this was.

After repeating this process a few times I will then take off just the wax and whatever particles are left, melt and then filter through a coffee filter or a piece of material which works best.

We sell our honey per 500g glass jar for R75 wax goes for about three times that price, not a bad business right?

This is what the cooling off mixture looks like in one of the bigger pots, tomorrow I shall begin step 2.

Below we have the wax starting to set. The mixture was still very hot at this stage, in the morning that whole top section will be yellow, with a few brown spots.

I will be posting step 2 in the next day or two.

Be sure to stay tuned for more of my epic bee-keeping adventures!

Have a super cool evening.

Cheer$;)