Ok guys - this is the result of this morning's experiment:
On the right is the wax recovered from pouring the 'soup' through a sieve and letting it harden. The slumgum in the sieve was squeezed-out the best I could. Plenty of propolis attached to the wax, and all-in-all not a bad yield from only a handful of old combs.
In the middle is the wax which resulted from then submerging the slumgum under boiling water, inside a pillow-case. The thickness is about half that of the first stage recovery (same sort of diameter), but only
half the slumgum could be treated ... so it looks like double the first yield is possible.
On the left is the 'make do with what you've got' kit that I'm using. You may notice strange shapes in the pillow case on either side of the heavy s/s plate.
In this shot you can see there are
still small beads of wax on the slumgum, even after one hour of 'boiling', and the two odd chunks of wax at the top of the photograph are those strange shapes in the pillow case, where the wax has separated out, but couldn't easily pass through the pillow-case material. The one on the right is 15mm thick !
One thing I noticed which could be an important indicator, is that slumgum without wax feels much like holding a handful of porridge, or wet compost. If there's any rigidity or firmness at all in the slumgum, then that's due to the presence of wax. No wonder those guys are buying slumgum, presumably from beekeepers using solar or steam extractors.
Next step is to make a mesh cage of some sort - and put that slumgum under boiling water again.
LJ