How To Filter Beeswax With An Instant Pot

In my previous video, I showed you a really simple, cheap method to extract a small amount of honey. What we got left over with was lots of wax. In this video, I'm going to show you how to render down a small amount of beeswax using an Instant Pot. So as I said, with this series of videos, what I'm looking to do is just to try and do things as cheap as I possibly can, with a real focus on the hobby beekeeper market, people with say 1 or 2 beehives. You don't need to splash out a lot of cash to filter your beeswax to extract your honey, and over the course of the winter, everybody's going to be focusing on saving a little bit of money. I'm going to do my bit to try and come at that from a beekeeping perspective, save you a few pounds. So as I said in the previous video, we filtered out our honey, we got it into a jar. If you've not seen that video, I'll link it out at the end. Really cheap, effective method using a potato ricer to extract honey, and we get left with all of this beautiful, really pure, clean slightly honey-coated beeswax. So all I'm going to do, literally couldn't be any simpler than this, take the dry beeswax and I'm just going to put it into a jar. So these cappings here, they've still got a little bit of honey on them. You can definitely put them back through the potato ricer, but you know, this kind of isn't my main method of extraction, so I'm just going to run with it. What I'm trying to prove the point here though is it doesn't matter if you get a bit of honey in here. And what you want to do is just keep on going. I've got loads of beeswax here, loads of empty little bits of comb. You wanna push it in as much as you possibly can and keep on squishing it down. So as you can see, you can just keep on compressing it further and further, get as much as you possibly can in here. Once you heat it up, it's all gonna collapse down anyway. You cannot overfill this at this point. So you wanna get it to a point where you've completely crammed full all of that jar with leftover beeswax. What I'm gonna do now is quickly take a sip of water, it's a hot day, and then I'm gonna fill the jar up pretty much to the top with water. I think you'll agree that's looking pretty cool. So then you wanna take any old 100% cotton material, make sure it's 100% cotton 'cause this is gonna go through the heat cycle, and then an elastic band, rest that over the top like that, and place the elastic band over it. You effectively end up with a very posh-looking wax, water, and honey mix. And that's it, it's all prepared. What we're gonna do then is get the Instant Pot on, get some water in it, get a trivet in it, and we're literally just gonna heat that up until All of the mixture's melted. The wax, the honey, and the water will all separate out from each other, and then all you need to do is tip it upside down, pour it directly into a mould, let it set, and everything should set separately. Right, so once you put the trivet inside the Instant Pot, fill it up with water. Make sure that the water is below the level of the trivet, and then all that's left to do is to place your jar inside in the middle like that, and you can just let the bits of rag go down to the sides. Finally, put your lid on, lock it into position, You want it on sealing, and all we're gonna do is put it on a really short pressure cook for about 10 minutes at high pressure. Right, it's a little bit cramped in here with the camera set up. 10 minutes later though in the Instant Pot, and we are now fully melted down and complete. And I have to say, I always find the composition of this is just really, really interesting. You never get as much wax as you think you're gonna get by doing this, and you need to do it numerous times. But as you can see, good amount of water in there. That bit at the top, that's the wax mixed with the honey, And once it solidifies, it will all separate out. So be very, very careful when you're doing this, but you've already put your rag over the top. Definitely get some protection on your hands if you don't want to do it when it's too hot, but the rag kind of serves as like a little bit of additional protection for you as well. But it will run out, so do heed the warning, take some additional protection. And you kind of don't want to do it too slowly. Doing it slowly kind of is counterintuitive, is more risk of it going everywhere. You almost want to invert it and just get it straight in without it sploshing out everywhere. I'm gonna record it, I'll record it in slow-mo, hopefully it won't go wrong. But before I do that, let's talk about the logic. You've got your fine cotton cloth over the top, the elastic band keeping it taut, the idea being that you should be able to filter everything out directly out from this jar, and then we're just gonna put it into these 2 plastic containers here, and then we're gonna leave it to solidify. So I'm just wrapping it up with another cloth there, and I'm gonna go straight out and tip it all out. So there we go, all complete. In this container here, this very hot container here, we've got a mixture of honey, wax, and water. All you need to do now is leave that to set and it will separate out into all of the individual parts. Right, so it doesn't take that long at all. I've taken that, I've put it in the fridge, and as you can see, we've got a nice big section of wax on the top and then some honey-flavoured water underneath. Definitely not gonna be drinking that water though, that is waste water, but it shows just how simple this process really is. So as I said, what I'm always so amazed at is just how little wax you get out of honeycomb like that. Probably only like the top 10%, maybe 15% of that is actually wax, and all of that stuff underneath is just honey-flavoured water, and all of the scummy bits as well. Let's see if we can get that wax out now as clean as possible, and I'll show you just how much the yield was. So these containers are really, really good. I'm doing this a little bit prematurely. It is better to let that completely set, and then you generally don't get the cracks in it like this one here. I'm gonna get it out, I'll show you just how much wax you get, how little wax you actually get from doing this. But if you've just got a couple of hives in your back garden and you want something to do with the wax that you'd otherwise probably chuck away, this is a great method. Use it for lip balms, use it for wood polish, loads of uses for really nice pure beeswax. So if you're lucky, you can just pop it out nice and clean. These containers here where you've got a bit of an angle are much, much easier than trying to get them out of, say, like a cylindrical glass jar or anything square, 'cause you get that little bit of flex in the material. I do find though a knife around the edges definitely makes it a lot easier. And there we go, that is our total yield. As I said, it's always amazing, isn't it, when you put that in the jar, you think it's gonna be so much more than that. Literally a tiny, thin slither of wax. But it's so easy to do, and you can do it again and again and again. And this is pretty much good for doing anything with now. You can further refine this, put it through layers of lint, But I would say for the vast majority of things, as long as the cotton that you've put over the top is a really nice, fine, good quality cotton, what you're gonna get out of there is pretty pure beeswax. So there you go, a really cheap method to turn leftover beeswax into a clean beeswax puck using an Instant Pot.