BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER > EQUIPMENT USAGE, EXPERIMENTATION, HIVE PLANS, CONSTRUCTION TIPS AND TOOLS
Double boiler wax melter
Lesgold:
Time to run the melter for the first time. Since my accident, I haven?t had much time or the capacity to finish some beekeeping tasks. Decided to clean up some wax that I?d gathered from cappings at the last extraction. It had been melted once but was still quite dirty.
It still had some propolis and slum gum attached as well as a bit of internal dirt. I should be able to clean it up quickly with minimal effort on my part. Here is the process as I go through it.
Step one was to fill up the melter with clean rain water to just above the top tap.
Step two was to set the temperature. I decided to set it at 73 degrees C as this would give me a melt temp close to 70. (There is some thermal loss as the temperature reading is set on the water jacket rather than product temperature)
The final step was to load the wax and put the lid on.
Less than 5 minutes work and the prep is done. I?ll come back in 12 hours and the wax will be melted. As this is the first time that this melter has been used, a temperature check will be made in the morning and slight adjustments will be made before I move on. Will keep you posted.
Cheers
Les
BeeMaster2:
Les,
Have you watched the old skep series videos on YouTube? There is one video on processing wax. The last step shows the senior beekeeper taking the wax blocks and scraping the propolis and dirt off of the wax blocks with a pocket knife. They then sell them as high quality wax.
Jim Altmiller
Lesgold:
I?ll have a look and check them out. I normally scrape propolis and dirt off after the final pour. There is still a lot of wax in the dirty sections on the blocks that you see so I didn?t scrape too much off these at all. Todays pour should get the blocks quite clean.
Lesgold:
Just watched the video clip. It was a cracker. Thanks for that Jim. Just checked the boiler to see how the wax was going.
As you can see from the photo, it was sitting at 69 degrees. Turned the thermostat up a touch and will let it sit while I have breakfast. Looks like a jacket water temp of about 76 C will give me the product temperature of 70 degrees. There is a few floaters that I will skim off before the pour. Instead of using a strainer for this purpose, I decided to make a skimming tool from a bit of fencing wire and some metal flyscreen mesh. The flyscreen is simply bent over the wire which means it can be replaced if needed.
I?ll get back to you in an hour or so to show you the pour.
Cheers
Les
Lesgold:
After skimming the wax and checking the temperature, most of the waste water was drained off using a tap that is about 25mm lower than the product tap.
The water is drained until a small amount of wax and slum gum exits via this tap. This means that most of the slum gum sits in a narrow band in between the two taps. The small amount of wax that comes out with the waste water will be added to the next melt. A small amount of wax is then drained into the waste water container from the product tap to clear any debris that may be behind this tap.
The wax can now be poured into clean containers. I use a chux super wipe as a filter to catch any fine bits of rubbish still in the melt.
About a cup of boiling water from a jug is then tipped into the wax. It will settle to the bottom and catch most of the really fine dirt that is still in the wax. The water also aids as a release agent when removing the wax from the container.
There will still be 25mm block of dirty wax that will set in the melter. It will be removed tomorrow and also be added to the next melt. I will post the results tomorrow when the wax cools.
Cheers
Les
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