Extracting wax

Have been leaving the bees alone to get on with their own thing - there's nothing to do really until I harvest the honey, which will be later this year, due to the school kitchen cleansing programme.

In the meantime, I thought I'd sort out the wax I've been collecting and purify it ready for use for candles or whatever. This is rather an arduous process, fraught with stickiness, as wax is a devil to get rid of. Used a lot of my soap-making receptacles and will now have to buy new ones for that, as the wax doesn't come off well enough.

What precedes the whole wax making process, is letting it drip off the honey. This can take ages and doesn't always work so well - depends how viscous the honey is. All through the summer I had a muslin hanging with wax in it and when it got hot, then the honey flowed. Was also a great way to perfect my fly-swatting skills. I got most of the honey out (and now have a good stock for soap-making!) and was left with a waxy gunge.

The wax had a tendency to set again, so putting a lid on it helped keep the wax fluid till all was melted

The first thing you need to do is melt all the wax in a bain marie that has some distilled water in it (apparently tap water ruins the wax a bit). The wax will float on the water and the rubbish will be either at the top or bottom of the resulting wax cake and the honey will dissolve in the water. After all the wax has melted, the whole thing needs to be cooled down gently, so I used the heating blanket to effect that. The result is a round wax cake, with residue on top and bottom, the worst of which you scrape off. All in all I had four of these cakes.

Top side of the cake still in the bowl and the bottom, once taken out.

 
I prepared all for the next step: filtering the wax. As a filter I used an old T-shirt stretched across a tin that I had opened at both ends. This was placed on wooden supports over the plastic tub, in which I would collect the wax. The tub was coated in a film of washing up liquid, to prevent the wax from sticking. 

All ready to filter.

I melted the way in the microwave, which worked well. Towards the end, the residue that transformed into a sediment, started to burn in the bottom of the jug. So I'll have to remove that at regular intervals next time I do this.

Microwaving wax - the whole kitchen smelt beautifully!

While still hot, the wax is poured through the filter, which invariably clogs up. This is not a major issue, as the hot wax melts it again, but towards the end this no longer worked very well and I have a lump of messy wax/rubbish to process next time.

I realized putting cork under the tub might be a good idea. Melted wax has a temperature of around 77°C.

A tub of pure, melted beeswax

I needed another two (smaller) containers to hold all the wax. Of course, despite washing-up liquid, the wax stuck to the large tub and I had to break it out. The other two released their wax with no issues.

Uncertainty, then hope

I gave the bees a little more time between inspections, as I wanted to be sure the putative queens had enough time to mate and lay. Luckily the weather had been beautiful (with the exception of the beginning of this week), so I had hopes both colonies would have laying queens.

As so often, I started with the Moon. Two supers are almost full, but the third one looks very empty. I re-arranged frames in the second super, to try to persuade the bees to fill out all combs with honey, so that it's easier to harvest, when the time comes (soon, soon!). When I got down to the brood box I was once again astonished, that the number of bees does not seem to have declined. There must be an element of drift from the Star to the Moon.

Moon still busy!

Working my way through the frames, I was pleased to see eggs! Not many yet (so the queen must be fairly newly mated), but eggs nonetheless. The Moon is saved (if the bees don't go off and kill her...). As I progressed through the inspection, I had the luck to actually see the queen: quite a tawny one. And, no: I did not try and mark her, but left her in peace to get on with laying.

The Star super is devoid of any noteworthy stores, so I think I'll draw a blank on that one honey-harvest-wise.
The brood box was quieter than the Moon, but had three sides of well-laid out brood. So the Star has a queen, too, who is busy laying. She must have mated about a week before the Moon queen, because some of the brood was capped.
Funnily enough, although I saw drones in the Star, there were none (or no conspicuous ones) in the Moon.
Another weird thing was that although the Star had brood (eggs, larvae and pupae), there was a closed queen cell. I think it's the same one that was there last inspection. Grown cautious through this year, I left it untouched, as I don't know what I might trigger if I remove it. I am not sure whether it is a developing queen or simply a monument to the bees' wishful thinking and hankering for a monarch. Somehow, I think it's the latter.

The same photo - but is it the same cell?