When you keep honeybees, one of the really amazing by-products to honey is bees wax! Over the last two years we’ve cut out all sorts of “rouge comb” in order to keep the hives nice and clean. We’ve been mindful to collect all of the extra comb and have been storing it in this five gallon bucket!

Just look at all that bees wax!

To figure out how to process the bees wax I went online and watched a few quick videos. The process is pretty simple, just get an old pot…this one is from Goodwill and is now our “wax pot.” Put all of the wax into the pot and bring the whole thing to a rolling boil.

It looks a bit like a witches brew…to bad Halloween is still a month or so away…

And then once you let it boil for fifteen minutes you turn the heat off and let it rest over night. The wax will float to the top and the all the other “stuff” will fall to the bottom.

Then you just pour out the water and scrape off the bottom of the wax circle.

See all the brown stuff on the bottom…that’s just waste that was collected when we were cutting out wax. We scraped off as much of the brown stuff as we could, and then started the process all over again with a slightly smaller pot. Yes, I made a few trips to Goodwill for this project, thankfully pots won’t cost you more than about seven dollars a piece!

Here is the wax all melted again. This time you can see how clear the wax is at the top of the pot. See the shine?

And once the wax set, you can see we have a much “cleaner” chunk of wax that can be used for candle making.

We repeated the process, and the brown stuff was scraped off the bottom of the wax circle.

Pretty neat huh?

I’m guessing we’ll need to melt this wax one more time, and then send it through some cheese cloth before we’re ready to make candles. Given the small quantity of wax that we actually collected, I may need to add in some purchased bees wax in order to make some larger candles.

Stay tuned for the next step, beekeeping is fun!