So many supers, so many frames; Finally its all spun out. Buckets and buckets of cappings, most of them relatively dry due to using an uncapping fork lifting the cappings off the honey cells above the air gap.
As before I wanted to clean the wax to use in lip balm, beeswax polish, etc. I found out the hard way that just heating it is unwise, you end up with a brown mess, you need to wash the honey out of it first. This has a nice side effect, basically, making mead. So to do so I put buckets at a time of cappings into a straining bag and washed them. Then straining them I used the washing water, now full of honey, to make mead. Just to understand the scale of this, I made 13 Gallons (uk) of mead.
Then it was time to melt down the wax. Now when it started it looked a lot like white sandy flakes, I added some rainwater (our local water is hard and that turns wax greenish). On heating all this brown gunk was produced along with the nice clean wax, even though there wasn’t a lot of brown going in, so I don’t know what that was. Anyway after decanting in bowls I waited for it to cool then scrapped the brown stuff off the bottom and heated it again. After a couple of rounds the wax is ‘mostly’ clean and the volume has gone down a lot; when I melt it again to make things I will decant it off the last of the gunk. End score 2.68kg 🙂
