Filtering Beeswax

Hold on to your hats, there's pictures of pans in this entry!

Having extracted a load of beeswax I needed to filter it to clean it up a bit -to remove any bits in there and make it look a little nicer. The wax I had extracted actually had very little detritus in it but some smaller bits had managed to make it through the grid of the Easi-Stem. My plan was to melt it then pour it through a filter into a mould to make a nice yellow beeswax block.

Someone on a bee keeping forum said he'd managed to filter his beeswax by pouring it through a layer of kitchen roll. I have kitchen roll so I decided to do that too. It's in the kitchen which is handy as that's where the cooker is and I'll be using that too. Wax is flammable stuff. That's why candles work. So melting in on the flame of a gas cooker isn't the safest thing to do. Instead you need two pans. A big one and a less big one. You put your boiling water in the first pan and then pop your less big pan with the wax in it into this. Apparently this arrangement is called a bain-marie which I unless I'm mistaken is French for "Hey, let's use two pans instead of one!"

Hey, let's use two pans instead of one!

It's not a great plan to use the pans you prepare food with to faff about with beeswax so I used an old pan that's been kicking abut in a cupboard since my student days for this. It's non-stick or it was originally anyway but a few years of student life in the days before I was any good at cooking has scratched away a lot of that teflon coating, however I don't think it's going to matter hugely. So with the water boiling in the large pan the wax melt merily in the smaller one.

Once it was melted I then pulled out another pan dedicated for wax use. This was a saucepan from B&M I'd bought specifically for the purpose. It was cheap, like everything at B&M. It's also non-stick. Onto this pan I popped a seive that hadn't been used before -possibly bought in error some time ago. Lined the seive with a piece of kitchen roll and stuck the lot in the oven to warm it up. I then poured the wax into the kitchen roll and popped it back the oven on a low heat to stop it cooling as it filtered through.

Once this was done I poured the wax into some child's baking moulds from Hobbycraft.

Some of these images are a bit unecessary really

And let it cool. I did wonder how I was going to get the cooler wax out of the moulds but after cooling I found flipping them over and giving them a bang made the wax drop straight out in a block that looked a lot like toffee.

There were a couple of points where I lost some wax during the process, one was when I accidentally got water into the bain-marie and decided to bin the wax and water in it and the other was when I knocked the bain-marie and spilt wax into the water. Oops. What I ended up with was 1650g of wax in blocks and a 428g foil container of wax I'm giving to a mate who's going to use it to make some guitar polish or something.

One lump or two?

I had originally planned to swap the wax for new foundation for next season but now I'm thinking I might have a go at making some furniture polish from this as that seems relatively simple (famous last words) and I can possibly flog a bit of it or perhaps give it to people as one of the world's crappest xmas gifts ever. Being a waste not want not kinda guy the kitchen roll I used to filter the wax got torn into strips or quarters and scrunched up into balls. These make good fire lighters and will be handy when I next decide to fire up the barbie or chiminea.

128g block of Beeswax