Rendering Beeswax – First Melt and Filter

This is Part 1. This takes the original combs straight from the hive down to a solid block for the first render. In this case, the combs had been slimed by small hive beetle (SHB) and contained all sorts of dead bee larva, beetle larva, wax moth, honey, etc. So just a whole hodgepodge of stuff.

Like usual, it is all melted together in one big pot with plenty of water. In general, the dirtier your wax, the higher your water/wax ratio needs to be . We melt it all down into a liquid mix, then sieve out the large solids, cocoons, larva, and dead bees.

Once it cools and solidifies, the wax has all floated to the top and leaves suspended gooey solids on the bottom, and also heavier solids that have sunk to the bottom of the pan.

Now we rinse off all the loose mucky debris. Next up we’ll take this same block of wax, and likely a few more like it after their primary render, and melt all of them together again. Hopefully if they all have a primary this clean, then all we’ll need is a secondary to pull out residual dirtiness, and isolate wax from propolis.

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