Beeswax Polish

Since deciding to start beekeeping I've found there's a lot of peripheral activity which doesn't directly involve being up to your elbows in colonies of eusocial stinging insects. Aside from heavy lifting, cleaning, sterilising, and more heavy lifting there's carpentry (of a sort), extracting honey and wax, cooking syrups and fondants for the bees, paying attention to the weather, and now to the list I'm going to add polish making. Having extracted and filtered my beeswax I'd originally planned to swap it for new foundation, but later decided to try doing something else with it instead..

Basically there's a huge number of uses for beeswax, if the mood takes you you can use it to make chapsticks, handcreme, moisturiser, soap, lip gloss and a load of other personal care type stuff -however I don't wear lipgloss and I'm seriously not about to launch my own line of cosmetics. Traditionally beeswax has been used to make candles since the year dot, however this is the 21st century and I don't burn that many candles in a year. Another thing people use beeswax for is making polish. And it turns out it's actually really easy. Just dissolve an amount of beeswax in an equal amount of turpentine and that's it. You can alter the ratio of turpentine to wax to make the final polish softer (more turpentine) or harder (less turpentine) and you can add canuba wax to make it easier to use.

I worked out that three of my beeswax bars was half a litre of wax (lucky) and purchased a half litre of pure turpentine -it has to be real turpentine though, none of that turpentine substitute or white spirits malarky. I was pleasantly surprised to find real turpentine doesn't give you the banging headache and nausea that the substitutes and white spirits tend to, which is a positive when you're heating a jar of the stuff in your kitchen. An obvious point to note here is that turpentine and wax are both pretty flammable substances and so there's an inherent risk in heating them up. In fact when I did firebreathing I ruled out turps as a fuel because I felt it was too flammable to use safely, insofar as exhaling a cloud of burning fuel is ever going to be safe -don't try that at home kids it'll probably kill you. So, anyone who wants to follow these steps bear in mind that you do so entirely at your own risk and when they pull your charred remains from the burnt out ruin of what was your house I take no responsibility

All you need to make polish

To speed the process up a bit it's best to melt the wax first. Of course the wax blocks wouldn't fit in my jar. Turns out it's actually quite hard to cut up blocks of beeswax, people talk about using a hot blade or wire but I suspect that's based more on theory than practice and you'd actually need a really hot blade with a built in heat source to do the job and it'd probably just set again once the blade had passed through anyway. I gather the easiest way is to grate the stuff, but I persevered with a large knife and cut the bars up just enough to cram them into a large jar.

Beeswax, still looking a lot like fudge.

I then stood the large jar in a pan of boiling water -yep an improvised baine marie. As I mentioned earlier wax is pretty flammable stuff so it's best not heated directly, unless you have a burning desire for the company of firemen anyway. Once it had started to melt I popped the jar lid on (it's a Sarsons Pickling Vinegar jar if you really want to know) and leaned the jar on it's side to reduce the amount of contact it had with the pan's bottom, I really didn't fancy the company of firemen at all.

Molten Wax and Turpentine

Once melted I added the turpentine, stuck some plastic under the lid, swirled it around, turned off the flame and left it sitting in the hot water whilst the turpentine dissolved the wax and I watched The Big Bang Theory, which was jolly entertaining. I reheated it a little bit afterwards but then got a big bored and decided to pour it into the tins. You can get polish tins from various beekeeping supply shops and I'd got ten from Thornes. They hold 100ml which worked out just right for my litre of polish.

One litre of freshly made furniture polish

I used heavy gardening gloves to hold the hot jar and a funnel to pour it into the tins. Didn't really fancy trying to clean up spilt polish so I placed the jars on a tray -luckily there were no accidents anyway. When it had cooled to a uniform pale beigey sort of colour I decided to test it out. Rather than starting a tin I scraped off some of the polish cooling on the side of the jar. I soon realised I don't really have much unvarnished or unlacquered wooden in the house to test it with and wound up applying it to the first thing that came to hand which was the wooden handle of a machette I use for green coconuts. It sees a lot of use in the garden and the kitchen (as multitools go a decent machete is a lot more useful than a pocketfull of Swiss Army Knife) so the handle needed a little attention after a couple of years use and exposure to water and various food related liquids. The polish was very soft I smeared it onto the wood, left it half an hour whilst I had a frothy coffee and unsuccessfully attempted to engage the cat in a conversation about our differing philosophical standpoints. After this I let the cat out, she wasn't very conversational anyway, and using a some kitchen roll removed the excess wax and buffed up the remainder with a polishing cloth leaving the wood looking better than it ever did when the tool had arrived brand spanking new from some wierdo online survivalist supply shop.

New polish

The really difficult bit was coming up with a label. I ordered some round labels from a stationers on tinternet who also supplied a template for label design. I fired up G.I.M.P. for Windows, an excellent free image editing package, and started faffing about with fonts and images till I wound up with something I liked. Getting it printed onto the labels themselves was a bit hit and miss. I'm not sure if that was the fault of the labels themselves or my five year old HP Photosmart 3010, either way for every six labels printed per sheet I seemed to get four good ones. The last thing to do was slap the labels onto the tin lids.

First batch of Beeswax Polish

Between typing up all that and publishing the post I ordered some more tins and turpentine and turned the rest of the wax into 33 more tins of  polish. I decided I wasn't happy with the bee on the original label so made a few changes and redited the image. The bee isn't really anatomically correct, but I think it'll do for now.

Finalised label art

Finally happy with my label and out of beeswax I now need to find some buyers for 43 tins of polish. Actually I've already bartered one for some windfallen apples so that's one down and 42 to go..