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..

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

Extracting Wax

Back in September I extracted the honey I'd harvested earlier by cutting the comb out of the frames then crushing and straining it. This left me with a load of frames with a lot of wax stuck to the edges as well as honey and propolis. Not enough propolis or honey to be particularly useful to me but the wax I can certainly use. Next year I'll be needing new foundation for the supers and some of the manufacturers have exchange schemes whereby you give them your wax and they exchange it for new foundation. Some people make their own foundation from their reclaimed wax, others use it to make candles or beeswax polish -actually that looks fairly simple so I might give it a whirl at some point, I'm sure I can find a use for it. Another use for the wax is treating the wood of the bee hives -you melt the wax and pour it on, it's bee friendly and waterproofs the wood. My housemate tells me some people apply beeswax to dreadlocks which strikes me as a great way to attract bees to your noggin. 8^O But whatever rocks your boat. Once at a party I had a go on a didgeridu. The mouth hole had a circle of beeswax on it that you could reshape to fit your mouth. There you go. Another use for beeswax that few of us can imagine being without.

So I've got these grotty frames asnd I want to reclaim the wax stuck from the edges of and I've also got 3 supers worth of shallow frames complete with comb from an auction that've been sat in bin bags since my buying them at a clearance auction. The wax from these frames I can't let my bees come into contact with because they're from another apiary and there's always the chance they may harbour some bee disease or virus which could get passed on to mine. It's also for that reason you shouldn't ever give honey to wild bees btw, no matter where you bought it.

So how to remove this wax then? Well I could spend a few hours carefully scraping off what I can and melting and straining it. But I won't. I'm a busy chap with things to see and people to do. What I did with the frames that came with the first hive was boil them in hot water then pour the water and molten wax into a bucket, as it cooled the wax which had floated to the top solidified into a disc which I was then able to remove, melt again and strain through cheesecloth. It worked okay and I did a similar thing with the remaining squashed wax from the honey extraction. It was a pain cleaning the wax and other crap from my large pan afterwards though so I don't plan to repeat that exercise. I've recently acquired a steam wax extractor, specifically a Thornes 'Easi-steam' -actually it's half an easy steam as I decided not to buy the steam generator seen as I already have a wall paper steamer and figured I could use that. Bee keepers are a thrifty lot.

The unit is basically a metal floor with a sort of spout bit on one side and a metal grille above that to catch any bits of crud, then there's an 'eke' (think of it as a quare empty wooden frame) to raise the box above a couple of inches from metal floor, and a metal roof skin with a hole in it that has a nozzle for a steam hose to attach to. You place a national wooden floor below the metal floor and a national super or brood box with all your grotty frames between the roof and the eke. The steam melts the wax and it runs out of the spout bit into your receptacle -in this case poundshop aluminium food containers -8 for a quid. Good Plan Batman!

I hauled out my steamer and discovered the hose end didn't really fit the Easi-steam's connector. Bugger. So a minute with some snips and I'd removed the offending thread from the steamer's hose, a few more minutes and a trip to the hardware shop on Chanterlands Avenue and I'd secured it with cloth tape and cable ties. Ace. 8-D

Cloth Tape and Cable Ties hose modification

Next problem was the floor I'd got with my initial hive, ordered via eBay from some idjit in Driffield, turned out to be the wrong size. It's commercial sized on the outside but the batons making up the sides are too wide for the tray doesn't sit in it properly it. If it'd been correctly made to either Commercial or National measurements I'd've been fine but that's the kinda chance you take if you buy things on eBay from people who use lots of capital letters and exclamation marks in their listings. Using a few random bits of wood to plug gaps I was able to bodge it anyway. I could've just made a new floor, it's not really rocket science afterall -seriously it's only three sticks and a square, and I think that'll be the plan next time I use it.

Easi-Steam Floor

I added the super -a Thornes super I'd bought unassembled from another eBay user. I figured different manufacturers probably have a few millimeters difference in size tolerance so go with the same and I should be fine. Although the super was cedar wood I'd painted the outside a rather natty shade of green Shed & Fence paint to match the hives and the rest of the boxes.

Easi-Steam Floor with Super and some sticky shallow frames

I loaded the super with sticky shallow frames that've been cling filmed and boxed up in the dining room since September's honey extraction, turned on the steamer and popped the metal lid on.

I mean tried to pop the metal lid on. Removed the metal lid, turned it 90 degrees and tried again, removed it again and tried refitting it a number of times. Went to the shed dug out the rubber mallet I used when I laid the patio a few years back and with a few carefully aimed and gently applied wallops managed to get the lid on properly. When Thornes said the lid fitted snugly they weren't kidding. Actually after doing the first batch I found the lid easier to remove and replace than before so the problem might've been that it'd contracted due to the cold and having warmed up it'd expanded again. In use the contraption has quite a steampunk feel to it with wood and metal surfaces, a hose and, of course, steam coming out of it. A bit of Raspuina playing in the background wouldn've been just the right audio accompaniment to the bubbling and dripping.

Easi-Steam in use

It worked a treat. within minutes there was some very clean pale yellow wax dribbling out of the spout into my foil food tray, accompanied by some brown looking water but TBH not as much water as I'd exected. I'd started in the early evening and as the temperature dropped the wax started to set on the spout and stopped coming out. Next time I'll do it earlier in the year whilst the weather's warmer, in the meantime I finished extracting the following day whilst the sun was up and it was still warm, I also did the second hand shallow frames too before sterilising them.

Loading up with used frames

The first thing I noticed about using the Easi-steam was the odour. It smelt fantastic. The super I used was made of cedar which normally has a fairly pleasant but faint odour to it anyway but with the heat and steam going through it the aroma was really strong and really pleasant -actually it was a lot like a sauna but without the unpleasant knowledge that all the wooden seats are steeped in other peoples' sweat. Nice :) The second thing I noticed was the wax dribbled out and cooled it looked like a fried egg with the molted wax in the middle and the paler set wax at the outer edges. The third thing I noticed was that the steam partly melted the plastic runners on the super, so next time don't use plastic runners. They cost almost a pound per pair so obviously I'm pretty devestated about that particular faux pas. The other thing I noticed was that not long after firing up the steamer a few bees came to investigate probably drawn by the smell of wax. They didn't stick around long enough to be a nuisance.

Molten Beeswax