After you have played with your solar melter and you get out a majority of the bee trash, you have one more final wax cleaning to go from semi trashy to full on sparkly clean beeswax.
You start out by breaking apart your semi trashy wax and adding it to an old yogurt container (or a glass jar) and floating this in a pot of boiling water. It's very important that you use a double boiler method to melt your wax. You can't add direct heat to beeswax, otherwise it will turn into a molotov cocktail on your stove. This stuff is good for lighting on fire, and that's why they make candles out of it.
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| Trashy Wax |
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| Trashy wax in a plastic tub |
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You melt the wax until it is completely liquid and then pour it into a fine sieve. I'm using an old t-shirt I cut up that probably says something like "fireman make the hottest lovers" and I was too embarrassed to wear out in public. I have a rubber band holding the t-shirt material onto an empty plastic container. |
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| Decanter our the fine trash on the very bottom so it doesn't clog your t-shirt |
After the wax has been filtered and is still hot, you can pour the sparkly clean wax into ice cube trays to have individual .5 oz chunks of beeswax to use. I've coated the ice cube trays in coconut oil as a release, so the wax doesn't stick to the tray. This is my first time using an ice cube tray. In the past, I have just poured the wax into a plastic tub and then hacked away at the lump of beeswax to get chunks for making product with. This seems like a great way for me to lose a finger, so I'm moving on to ice cube trays.
awesome! thanks for sharing this info jessie!!
ReplyDeletepoor little wax entombed bees!
ReplyDeleteI know, those poor bees. That was a big mistake on my part not putting a lid on the solar melter. Last time I will make that mistake.
ReplyDelete