Laurence Edwards compares Thorn's free Wax Exchange with its paid Wax Conversion service for turning raw beeswax into foundation sheets. Exchange gives you fewer sheets per pound but costs nothing; conversion charges £1.67 per pound and yields 8 sheets per pound, making it better value for larger batches of wax.
Today I'm going to talk to you about wax conversion, wax exchange, which one I think is best. So I'm off down to the Welsh Beekeepers Convention tomorrow. I've got about 7 or 8 pounds of unrefined wax that I want to swap over for some foundation. I used to get so, so confused when it came to swapping wax for foundation or converting wax into foundation. In this video, I just want to make it really, really simple for people as to which one to go for and the differences between the two. So loads of different manufacturers that do this. I'm going to use the figures on the Thorn website because that's who I'm exchanging my wax with at the Welsh Beekeepers Convention, and I believe they were the first company to actually offer a wax exchange service. So let's start off with wax exchange because that is by far and away the simplest of the two. So wax exchange is incredibly simple. You get yourself a big block of unrefined wax, you swap it with the company, and dependent on the weight of the wax that you're giving them, they They will give you something in return. No cash changes hands, everything's nice and simple, and there's a table to work out exactly what you want. So you can have wired drone foundation, unwired worker foundation, thin foundation for section honey, Dadant commercial, Langstroth, anything. The conversion chart will give you absolutely every single conversion ratio, and it's as simple as working out how many pounds of wax you have, if you want your foundation to be wired or unwired, Work out the size that you want as well, and it will give you a really accurate measure of the amount of foundation you will receive for your unrefined wax. Couldn't be simpler than that. I know when you're looking at it on the website, sometimes looks a little bit scary, a little bit daunting. It's as simple as that. You exchange X amount of wax for X amount of foundation. So I'll give you a couple of conversion figures there. For every single pound of wax you exchange with Thorn, you get 3¾ deep National Wired foundation sheets. If you move that over to unwired foundation, for that same pound of wax you get 4¾ unwired foundation sheets. And then sticking with that National Deep, if you go with thin foundation that you're going to use as, say, section comb, you'll get 7¼ sheets per pound of wax. Like I said, every single permutation of what you want will have a quantity next to it per pound of wax. Just looking at the Thorn website there, they actually always round it up to the nearest sheet of foundation. So when I was doing my sums recently, I was thinking I've probably got about 7 or 8 pounds of unrefined wax that I'm going to convert over to foundation. And I was looking at it and I was thinking, I don't really get that much for my money. I'm probably better off keeping my wax and using it for something else, maybe selling the wax and then actually just going and buying some foundation. For me, the wax exchange rates, not that good. Not particularly happy with them. Not that there's anything wrong with them. I just kind of look at my big blocks of unrefined wax and think I could probably do more with them than actually exchanging them straight out for foundation. But Thorn have got you covered on this one as well because they do a wax conversion service, and it's slightly different to the wax exchange. So wax exchange, like I said, very simple— big block of wax, you turn it into a big stack of foundation, no money changes hands. The way that the conversion is different is that money does change hands, and the way that money changes hands is they offer you a service to convert your beeswax into foundation And then they charge you a conversion rate per pound to give you a more profitable outcome at the end. I know I'm massively overcomplicating that. Let's talk through an example then. So at the moment, up to 55 pounds of wax, the Thorn conversion rate for wax foundation is £1.67 per pound. That means if you want to convert 10 pounds of wax into foundation, you'll pay 10 times that £1.67, so you'll pay £16.70 to Thorn to convert that wax into Foundation. However, what you get when you go through this conversion service is a far superior exchange rate. And when you start dealing in bigger quantities of WAX, it makes so much more sense to go for this conversion. Pay a little bit of money up front and you get a lot more WAX in return. So let's stick with that £10 example. I'm going to pay £1.67 per pound to convert that over— £16.70— and then it means I'm going to get 8 sheets of foundation per pound of wax. If you look back at the wax exchange ratio there, you're only getting 4¾ sheets per pound. So you're effectively paying £1.67 for 3¼ sheets of foundation, which is really, really good value. The wax conversion— if you want to pay for a wiring charge as well, you can pay for a wiring charge. And the current wiring charge for Thorne for the British Standard Deep is £1.27 per 10 sheets of foundation. So if I wanted to get all of those 80 sheets of foundation from my £10 Wax Exchange wired up, I'd pay an additional £10.16. So this is why people get confused with it, because even me doing this now, I'm thinking, oh my God, these sums are getting just out of control. In this video, I thought I'd just break it down, show you what the difference is, show you which one I prefer to use, and just try and make things a little bit simpler. If you want to check out my latest Thorn product review, check out this video here showing my Thorn Empire Smoker.
