Beeswax!

I confess I forgot to include you in my beeswax making method.  I forgot to blog it, photograph it, and share it. If you'd like to check out the link to the YouTube video I used, go here.  The guy in this video uses a solar oven.  I just used my regular oven on the lowest temperature and it worked great.

Here are the awesome results!  As mentioned, I washed the wax in water twice to remove as much honey and other impurities as possible.  Then using an old window screen that would fit in my oven, I layered an old 9x12 cake pan with an inch or so of water on the rack in the oven.  The window screen was placed on top of the pan and a paper towel was placed to fit exactly over the cake pan but on top of the window screen.  The paper towel was my fine sieve, used to remove all the tiniest bits of impurities.  Then I heaped the wax "shavings" onto the paper towel, turned the oven on low and watched and waited until all the wax melted through the paper towel into the waiting cake pan.

The most crucial part was to turn off the oven and leave everything alone until the morning.  This way the pure wax hardened and floated on the water in the pan and there was no accidental mixing of impurities back into the cooling wax.

I have this photo of some of the wax collected after straining the honey out.  This is before all the wax was collected and washed twice.

My sheet of wax is quite thin because I didn't have a whole lot of wax.  But this will melt nicely into my molds for easy use.

Honey Harvest Part Two

This is the second straining of honey.  This time it is through cheesecloth to remove all the tiny bits of beeswax.  Underneath the cloth, the honey is a pure smooth golden treasure!

The last step is to fill our jars with the liquid gold.

Aren't they beautiful?

Next time I'll share how I render this wax into pure beeswax and pour them into molds to use in my Pysanky classes!  Stay tuned....as I have to get back on You tube and do some research!

Harvesting Honey

It seems odd to be thinking of harvesting when the temperature is lingering in the teens.  Well, it is because of these low temps that we are harvesting...honey.  Unfortunately, a friend lost a couple of hives of bees due to the extremely brutal winter we've experienced this year.  His bees died.  So the honey that was meant to feed his colony through the cold months has become our harvest, and a blessed gift.

Of course, Mike and I did what we usually do when trying something new...we You-tubed it!  We learned how to slice the wax caps off the honey filled combs, and strain pints of liquid gold from the beeswax.  We are also planning on purifying the wax to be used in future Pysanky classes.

I must confess, when Mike called last night to tell me his friend had given us two honey frames, I was not excited about the prospect of getting the sticky stuff out of the frame and figuring out how to separate the wax from the honey.  After watching the You tube video, I became fascinated and eager to try.

In fact, we've been discussing the possibility of some small scale bee keeping ourselves.  Stay tuned...

Slicing the wax caps.

Straining the honey.

The empty frames.