Wax melting experiment

in Homesteading2 years ago

Clearing the rubble in the beekeeper's house, I found a lot of old frames that are no longer suitable for installation in hives. Part of the wax is eaten by moths, part is simply spoiled. It's a pity to throw them away, because each frame contains a lot of wax. I decided to try to re-melt the frames and get wax, which in the future can be used for making wax foundations and candles.

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Of course, I have no experience, as there are no special tools for re-melting, so I went the easiest way because it's just an experiment. I decided to just put the old wax in a bucket of water and boil this water over a fire.

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Which I did. The wax floated to the surface.

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After the water cooled down, it turned out to be such an ingot.

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However, the ingot turned out to be dirty.

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After cleaning with a knife, it has significantly decreased.

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For further cleaning, it was necessary to re-melt the wax. In order not to suffer with cleaning, I put my ingot in a bag, put a stone in the same place, lowered the bag into a bucket and put it to boil for the second time.

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You can see how the wax floats to the surface.

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And all the dirt was left in the bag.

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After the repeated procedure, the ingot became even smaller, but noticeably cleaner

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For the wax foundation, the procedure will need to be done again, but I decided to stop there. I'll make candles out of this wax, so I won't need to filter the dirt anymore

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In general, the experiment was a success. It will be necessary to collect more frames and melt more wax, but I'll tell you about it another time

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There is only one thing which is done in a different way in order to preserve the properties of the wax.
it is recommended to use what we here call "Baño Maria". the wax to be melted should be melted in a recipient that is submerged in the water that you then heat. this way the process is slower and the direct heat from the fire does not come in direct contact with the wax.
I have tried this once and then poured the melted wax through a mosquito net into a dry clean recipient to get read of debris. worked pretty well.

Thanks. Next time I'll try melt wax as you said