Laurence Edwards shows how to filter beeswax using just a heat source, bucket, and cotton pillowcase. Melt mixed wax to 65-70°C, pour through the pillowcase, and you get 5-6 kg of clean, cosmetic-grade blocks per batch. The whole setup costs almost nothing.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to take wax cappings, old brood frames, anything that contains beeswax in it, and show you a really simple method to filter that beeswax to get it into a nice clean state, ready for use for exchanging it for foundation, or if you're going to put it through further filtering processes.
So in this bucket here, you can see this is pretty typical of what we get. This is a mixture here of wax cappings, some old bits of darker frames as well, We tend to do this in a couple of grades, but this here is pretty much indicative of the general mix that we get. We do take off all of the nice cappings wax, and we do that in a separate batch just to keep the good stuff all to one side. This is the end result, and as you can see, it is perfectly clean, beautifully clear.
It comes out really, really nice, and this method is super, super simple.
This is near cosmetic grade. Look at the shine on that. All you need to do this is a method of heating up the wax. A bucket and a pillowcase.
So you know this, this is no-nonsense beekeeping. You don't need any expensive piece of machinery to do this. You can do it in a bain-marie, you can do it in a pan if your husband or wife will let you get away with it. We do it in the Melleflo if it's clean wax or if it's just wax cappings. So we took all of our manky wax cappings, we put it into the Melleflo, we heated it up to the correct temperature. For bees, we actually want to aim for around 65 to 70 degrees. You don't want to overheat that wax, but you want to make sure that everything's completely liquid. And here it is— old duvet covers. This one here's got a bit of a linen print on it. It doesn't matter even if it's got some print on it. The colors don't tend to leak at around 70 degrees. Preferably though, you want it completely white. They're the best. And preferably you want it 100% cotton. Once you've identified which pillowcase you're going to use, take a standard 30-pound bucket and line the bucket with that pillowcase. Then once you've made sure that all of that beeswax mixture is completely melted, you pour it through the pillowcase into the bucket, take it outside, lift out the pillowcase, and leave it to drain through. Takes a little while to drain through, but if you've got it up to the correct temperature, you'll get pretty much all of it through. And then all you need to do is you just need to leave the buckets to completely cool down. But that is it. Look at the size of that block. Absolutely beautiful. I got about 7 of these doing my big batch. You can see at the bottom there, you just get this kind of residue. This is where I've cleaned it all off. I'll show you a picture here 'cause I had some really overcooked honey that I put through that, cleaned it off. But anyone who knows beeswax, you will see if you're getting that nice sheen on the top there, that's gonna show you that it's very, very pure. And the colour of it as well. Just look at the colour, shows that you've not overheated it. It's a good quality beeswax. I'm estimating that probably 5 or 6 kilos, maybe something like that. A nice big heavy block of beeswax.
So I hope you enjoyed that video.
Definitely give that method a try. And why not check out our most popular video on YouTube with over 65,000 views?
