Laurence Edwards shows how Thorne Beekeeping turns dirty beeswax into finished foundation. Raw wax gets melted in a water bath at 80°C to separate impurities, then pumped through rollers, embossed with the cell pattern, and finally wired by hand using foot pedals and electric current.
Today I'm at Thorne Beekeeping exchanging some beeswax, and in this video I'm gonna show you every single step along the way to turn this beeswax here into pure beeswax foundation. So after the wax has been weighed in the shop, Thorne stack it all up in huge pallets outside the waxworks ready for melting and turning into foundation. The assortment of wax here is absolutely incredible. Like this piece here is a bit frozen, but you can see really nice. And then you can see we've got like little pieces, little scraps of dirtier foundation with crud. Obviously, Thorn prefer it as clean as they can possibly get it. Then you've got like some offcuts, maybe some factory thirds that didn't go out for sale, or someone's just ordered the wrong size and they've decided to exchange them back in for some new foundation. And then interestingly, this is pure beeswax as well. It's just a completely different colour, really, really dark, no crud or anything in it whatsoever. All of this goes in a big pot, goes inside, gets melted down, and that's where we're going next. So we're in the wax room now at Thorn Beekeeping, and I'm with Greg, who is a master wax melter. He's going to talk us through the initial process of turning that dirty wax into pure wax foundation. So, hi Greg, tell me exactly how this machine works.
It's pretty much just a big, uh, just a big tank that gets warm. It's about 120 litres of water in the bottom of it, so we'll boil it up, get it all melted, and then we'll leave it overnight. It'll separate. All the dirt will stay in the bottom in the water, and the wax will stay on top of the, uh, on top of the water.
So it's as simple as just taking a big block of wax and just plonking it in?
Pretty much, yeah.
Right, so we've taken our rough wax, we've put it in the melter, Greg switched it on, and that is bubbling away now, getting up to temperature. So the wax generally melts at around 60 degrees Celsius. The machine there's set for about 80 degrees Celsius, but it takes a really decent amount of time because there's about a ton of wax in there to actually get up to temperature. There's a bit of water in here as well, and then at the end of the night, they turn the machine off and all of the rubbish settles down to the bottom, leaving at the top molten, clean, pure beeswax. So once the beeswax is up to temperature in this tank, got these pumps on the side here and it's pumped away into another holding tank ready for rolling. So this here is the secondary beeswax tank where all of that clean beeswax is pumped into for holding, and then down here we've got the rollers. So we've got the molten wax here in this big holding tank. That's fed down to this tap here that feeds this little tray down here. You've got a float in the tray to make sure that the wax is in the right level. And then you come through to probably the coolest thing I've seen so far, which is this wax roller. This roller here is cooled, and as you can see there, it's picking up a really thin amount of wax. Then over here you've got a hot water blade that's cutting off a nice thick piece of beeswax that is very slowly being rolled over at this end. Right, Thorns are putting me to work now. Let's take this roll of wax over to the embossing machine. Right, so onto the embossing stage. We have a roll of wax down in this tank here with hot soapy water. That roll is fed up through here and more hot soapy water is dribbled down on top of it, and then it goes through this metal embossing machine. So the metal embossing machine gives you that standard foundation sizing, and then as you can see coming out of the other end, we've got big rolls of wax foundation. And then we get to the end of the machine and you can see the perfectly embossed, really beautiful yellow wax foundation comes out. And then once it gets to the correct length at the end, an automatic machine cuts it off in perfect timing.
Okay, so this is our manual wiring machines. I'm on the shallow size wax. You have 2 pedals underneath which control your pins, and either side you have clamps and cutters. So you want to clamp your wire down this side, your left pedal which brings your pins down, Weave your wire over the wax of the pins, clamp it down the other side. If you lift your foot up, it creates the tension in the wire, and this button here just sends a small electric current through which melts the wire into the wax. Cut off your wire either side, your left foot pedal down, your right foot pedal, and then you can lift your wax off.
So there we go, we've taken a block of crude beeswax, taken it all the way through that process, and we've ended up with freshly embossed, beautiful wax foundation.
