AWESOME Wax melting setup for Hobby/Sideline Beekeepers!

Hi, I'm Caiman Reynolds on the big island of Hawaii and my friend David will kindly show us the process of how he handles wax. He's got a nice accent, a wax

melting

tank here and he's done some stuff in the video. has already finished to improve the process for him and help make the cleanup time and everything else better, so without further ado I'll let David tell you all about it, so I keep my wax melter at about 160 degrees and Actually , this is a temperature probe for my barbecue and what I do to start here is put some water in the bottom to make it work.

Some people will try to capture the honey left on their lids by starting the process. process and then drain the honey because I use a stealing container, I don't have much honey left in the wax and the honey that would come out of this for me doesn't fit my process, it could get too hot. be darker and we really try to focus on a high quality honey that is purely raw, not heated or made any other way, so anyway what I do is I put the wax in here and I have this that will hold about six cubes of wax caps if I do.

Get greedy, I can get some more. I started doing this last year and I've been working on my programming and my timing, so what's going to happen here is this is going to start to melt and at some point it's going to turn into a big ball. In the middle of the melted wax, so to speak, what happens is I'll take a stick and then I'll break that ball so it melts faster. My goal is to have this ready to serve in one day, so this is one morning, we're going to do this, so tomorrow mid-morning the wax will be ready and I can ladle it in once it's done.

I saw a fancy beekeeper in Canada about a really fancy wax melter that I couldn't afford, but I'm kind of a learner and then I take those ideas and try to develop them into something I can make or afford, so what I saw him do It was removing a piece of gum from a poor neighborhood and then using water to remove the rest. getting wax out of gum in the slum, so anyway I came up with this that is basically modeled after that idea, so using water in there will be a key component to help get out any remaining little bits of wax that you can get out of the gum.

Poor neighborhood. gum, so this is a screen device that I made that will go in and we'll show you that when we get to that part of the process, we're here next to a theft container and what this is is that after the honey has been uncapped , there are all kinds of honey scraps and you still have a good bit of honey in there and it's great if you let the bees have access to that, however there is something you need to keep in mind in some states this is totally legal and in others no, so you have to see what your local laws are in the state of Tennessee, you are not allowed to do this type of thing, but in many states you should definitely check beforehand, but this can be very helpful if it is legal in your area and David will show us. why he does it and basically you know the next step so what we have is this is our like alligator said our steal container we don't have a wax spinner in our honey house so we bring all the tops made and we let them drip. dry for a couple of days get as much honey as we can and then we'll bring it here.

We keep a few hives on the property here and they will come and actually clean the wax most of the time pretty well, so I have a lot of capping wax, which is the really clear wax and then on this other end, we had some wax that It came out of the brood chamber which is very dark, we didn't really separate it, I'll just go ahead and put it all in. the container, so once we're ready to make the wax, we're going to take this and we're a little bit small and it's a little bit more work, but basically I just load up some cubes and then I take them to the wax melter, okay?

We are back at our wax melt, it's been a little over 24 hours so the wax melted quite a while ago, but our guests from Tennessee have adapted very well and quickly to the Hawaiian schedule which is quite casual, so anyway we're back here at the wax melter, if I repeat some things I did or said before, it's been maybe three minutes for you, but for me it's been over 24 hours and sometimes I can't remember what I said three minutes ago, so what I've done is I have just a little sieve here and I use it just to catch the little bits of gum that will float to the top of the wax, so the wax will melted yesterday afternoon.

I went down and there was a ball of wax. inside because it melts first from the bottom and the edges and then I break it with a stick so that it melts faster and the hot wax gets in. Another thing that's important is that if you fill it too much, this is a double wall, so it's actually quite efficient, but if I'm way above the water level that's here, then the top of the wax can still be a little bit solid, so you have to push it down, so I try not to go over that, but sometimes Do it right now, let's put this in these are little dish containers.

I bought them at Walmart or for three or four dollars each, I have had them for many years and you can use them over and over again. So we only have a little picture of wax here, so what I do right I'm sorry, I have to put my glasses on to be able to see, but I start to let the wax go into the jar here and you can see little pieces of gum from chew or whatever. that floated up and I just filled a jar and then I try to be very gentle so as not to stir up the gum on the bottom and the screen is hot so it doesn't solidify as much on the bottom and so the wax will still flow so I keep going doing that, we only have about five five gallon buckets of wax in here.

You can usually put a little bit more in, like I said, six possibly seven if I push it in and you can see there's a certain amount of debris sticking to the outside, which isn't a big deal. I do it like I said yesterday, low and slow, the

melting

point of the wax is just below 150 so this is around 160 degrees, I found it if you try to do it hot and then you end up having to skip a day or it happens something, the wax gets darker and darker and over time I found that comparing blocks of wax a day later can change the shade by one or two shades darker, for some people it's not a great deal with some people, maybe you can see here that the gum starts to show around the edges and rises as our wax level goes down, so I'm going to find little pockets and use the jar to bring the wax level up. and then I just let a fine stream of wax go into the jar creating these little puddles and I want to get as much wax out of here as I can on my first deal here, so I'm very careful and a little bit It's a little bit methodical to get it out and put it in here, almost there, you just get these little thin streams of wax and you can see the gum coming everywhere and there's just little bits, little pockets or we could say in Hawaiian pukas, which means whole. there are these little holes or wax pukas, so I'm going to try to remove them.

There are a certain amount of small fines that will come in here. Basically, you can move around like you're looking at it here and you see some little ones. The super fine materials start to run so you can see now that the gum was pretty much level and there really isn't much wax. We're going to get more wax and I'm just going to even them out to try not to splatter wax. I wear old clothes, I wouldn't tell you this in my everyday clothes, but they really are, but anyway, it would help more, but I'm not in life.

I'm dressed well today, good for me anyway, I have the only good pair. of jeans that fit me they keep putting propolis on me and well editions of beeswax

beekeepers

and clean clothes really don't go well not at all we are nails when you go out and they have problems under the back plates it's horrible but it's really clean, it's just being clean , so what I'm going to do is just scrape it off, there ends up being, you know, kind of a layer of wax on the jar and a little bit on the inside, so just scrape that off.

Take out your beehive tool and put it back in there, so the way I used to do it is I used a frying spoon and I would pick up the gum and shake it and let the wax drip out. As long as I was patient, which usually wasn't very long, and then I would just throw this out, I get bored, that's how I used to do it like I said until I watched the video and I just show you what we're going to do next just because here's the little one wax thing I made, I said I saw a video, I saw it and then I took the idea and adapted it to what I do, I made it all out of stainless steel.

I don't have to do that I just like it and it will never rust and it should last many lifetimes this is just a sheet of perforated stainless steel these are little quarter inch holes in the center of 3 8 inches I didn't do it I knew exactly what to buy so I picked one and it seemed to work and it worked pretty well and then this is just one inch and a quarter eighth inch stainless steel and the legs are one inch and eight inch stainless steel so that I just did it. I had a little ring roller and made a ring.

It's important that it fits on the side so that the gum doesn't come up around this device, so I'm going to pull back the little bit that we took out. the screen because it can come out wants to come out normally that would be just for most

beekeepers

, it would be rubbish right there. I'm really interested to see how much wax you can get out of all that, yeah when I watched the video the ending really intrigued me because of what it captured and I know from all the years I've done it that I would just throw that in and I could see the pools in the trash can and again, not always being as diligent as I should be, the trash can would get heavier and heavier and I would have to ask my friend to help me load it onto the truck to take it to the station. transfer, so I'm going to stop by here, so um, oh, I should have.

I showed you this, so the level here is a little bit high right now because these legs are going to sit at the bottom, so you want the level to be lower than whatever the top of this is the level that I can trim another inch off these. legs, it's just one of those things I've never done again. Once you get it going, you just move on to the next project, so we're going to lower the level of this tank below this and then I'll be ready for the final step of the process, so I just use one bucket, it's just a five bucket. gallons and it's kind of a honey residue that was left inside of the honey and the water that I put in there to start the The whole process is going to come out now, my level there's not a huge amount in there so basically what I'm looking at is because I have the temp gauge the little stem sticks out there and that's about my level okay so we got I got um uh the liquid drained out and our slum gum level is down all the way down now we'll be under our legs, uh, just a little bit here, so we'll go ahead and drop this in, it's a pretty snug fit, there's a little bit of room, if there's too much room, then the slum gum will come up over the edges if it's that you don't have it low enough and I tried different things and this is the system I found that worked well to have the slum level below the screen and not try to push the screen down through the slum gum.

I ended up with a lot of slum gum in my wax recovery area, so what I'm going to do now is something else I learn by doing. I take water and I'll spray it on the slum gum, so what happens with that is it solidifies the thin layer of wax that was on top of the slum gum and it actually acts as a cap or a shield against the Gum from the slums. Going up through all the little pukas on the screen here, so I'm going to fill this up here so we have water and we probably have a good two and a half inches or maybe even a little bit more. above the screen so the slum gum was about an inch below the screen so we took the water and it created a shield to hold everything under the screen and now we have clean water on top of the screen , if you dont do it.

Put enough water on the screen and you will have enough wax on the slum gum. What will happen is that as the water displaces the wax, the wax will sit on top of the screen and I've done that before and then it will have a bad time. because the wax is stuck to the screen so it's a mess to get the final wax out of the blocks we made, as you saw there may be some little particles there or some other things that are there and most people don't seem to I don't care that when I make my wax I can sell small blocks or that people want to use it in lip balms or candles or things like that, I will load my wax blocks here again, without water or anything else, I just put the blocks in place and melt them again about at the same temperature.

I don't upload it because I want to try not to make the wax darker, so these are just a little filter sock and I get them on Amazon. I have some inGranger um these are actually, I think they just call them filter socks and I think they use them for water or other things, but I just hook a little cord to them and put it under my beak and then I'll put whatever containers I have. I'm going to do this and if I'm going to make larger blocks at a certain weight, then I know where to close it and this really removes everything else, about 10 microns.

Some people I think make 15 or 20 microns. some five I haven't tried, the tin worked great so just from experimenting this works well, it's hard to use them a second time because the wax will absorb and turn into a hard shell so you can probably soften them. and reuse them if you want, but they are pretty inexpensive, but one of theseAs long as your wax is pretty clean, like you've gone through the first process, a sock will be fine to do this, it's probably £150 or more worth of wax, so you can get a lot of life out of these, yeah. so anyway that's it, that's

awesome

, we'll go on a little bit more here shortly, okay, we're back at the wax melter, so yesterday we put in, I don't know what you'd call it, basically, our separator device for separated the remaining waxes in the slum gum this morning, went down early, basically stayed up all night so I'd say probably 15 hours or something and then unplugged it this morning so the wax could solidify and it cooled down so basically Yesterday I saw that there was just a little bit of berry and wax on top of the slum gun, so we took a lot more wax out of that slum gum that was there to form a disk like this.

You could scoop this out if you want and pour it into a container I just started testing at the end you'll get a little bit of water or honey water in this so just rinse it off when you're done or I just take this and throw it away. Next time I'm going to do wax, so sometimes this is a little difficult with gravity working, the gum also wants to come out and what it does is it forms almost into a compressed cake. I want to make sure that when you put this down you have enough room at the bottom and this could break and splatter, so I wanted to show you all these drips of wax coming out of this, if you can get that bay, that's really cool. because you can see where he added that the water obviously wax floats up because it's lighter than water and you can see where that wax comes out through that gum and you're getting a lot of that wax.

Back with this method, that image is really cool, although yeah, basically overnight, the water and gravity are doing their thing and they're just changing places, so the slums calm down a little bit, Let's see we don't get a big splash here. It might stay there and we'll do the best we can and usually we'll just scrape it off, but you can see all the thin gum on the bottom here and really most of the wax has been removed. I see it crumbling a lot in some ways, it almost looks like dirt, but the main thing for me was that I wasn't throwing away good wax anymore.

I just ended up with this product that I haven't discovered anything to do with. So far I take it to my composting operation and we have a lot of feral pigs here and they actually like it a lot, they will eat everything and I guess we are feeding some pigs around here anyway. it looks like dirt that for those of you who have waxed a lot, usually at this stage you have so much wax in the gum that it doesn't break like that at all, it's like that block you originally pulled out. except it's a block of brown wax and you can't do this too where he's just breaking it up like compacted dirt, yeah here's another shot without the grid of the wax drips coming out of the slum gum so you'll have some of these here, but they're actually just a very thin layer on the surface, so anyway it's really cool, it feels good to be able to do this and not end up with something so big. solid block of really you know, that's some wax, you know, there's probably, I don't know, a couple three pound wax, at least of that, I would say I wouldn't have recovered it before, they would have just thrown it away and we wouldn't have.

I don't have anyone here who takes gum and reprocesses it or there isn't that kind of thing available, but either way this is just part of that product. These are the blocks we made yesterday. You can see that they turned out very pretty. That's nice, they're a nice color, you'll see some little impurities that managed to get through or get washed away and this is some very fine gum that you may have seen getting into the cup that was still suspended. and it goes through that little thin screen again, if you want to get that out, that's where the filter sock comes in.

You can take a bunch, remelt them, and run them through a filter sock and you'll have beautifully clean wax. We'll try I have a link for this sock in the description below that way if you want to get some really great ways to filter wax, I mean gosh this one is 10 micron so I'm sure once you approve it , it will be beautiful. Yellow wax, yeah, and it's perfect for anyone who's making lip candles or other things that they want to do for beauty products or whatever, but that's basically the wax melter and, uh, what we're doing, uh, here I hope it has helped. someone and it was a fun project and it's always exciting when you have ideas and you do something and it actually works very well very good David I really appreciate it a lot this is a really cool system and you know a lot of you are wondering. what kind of videos we do, we do everything from commercial beekeeping to

hobby

beekeeping and things like this are right in the middle which is more about what we do just little tips that might suit the operation you are trying to start up and who can help you David again.

Thank you so much. This has been incredible. Yes, no problem. See you in the next video.