Processing large quantities of beeswax

[TheFuzz]

I have about a dozen buckets worth full of unprocessed beeswax. My plan was to process it all via a solar wax melter, but I've found that, with the amount of beeswax I have, it'll simply take too many years to process it all this way.

I had some wax moth in some of these buckets awhile back, so I melted down all that wax, and sieved it into a bucket using an old t-shirt. I took a photo of one of these buckets it's the first photo:


The wax is now stuck to the sides and I'm not sure how to actually get the wax out of the bucket. Note that it's also got mold growing on it. I have three buckets like this. The rest of the buckets are the leftovers from when I used to do crush and strain.

Can any of you suggest the best way for me to go about processing all of this wax? I'd like to turn it all into uniform size blocks, maybe 0.5 or 1 KG rectangles. I figure I'll have to buy some things for doing this as I've had the misfortune of discovering everything I use to process wax becomes ruined.

[BeeMaster2]

Your link went to the wrong location.
I deleted it.
Try posting your pictures by shrinking them and posting them using our system.
Jim Altmiller

[NigelP]

Processing that amount depends on the kit you have available.
I have an apimelter which will take 4 x 10 liter buckets at a time.
My prefered method is add water to bottom of bucket and make a filter with hessian (Burlap) sacking and clip this to top of bucket and put the wax on top of this. This filters off most of the propolis and gung and gives you a relatively clean block of wax floating on top of the water (which makes it easy to remove the wax block and also dissolves any honey in your wax). If you let it cool down slowly you will get a single round block, if you cool it fast it will crack in places and you end up with several pieces.

[Michael Bush]

Pour some boiling water over the outside of the bucket and it should get the sides loose.  Then it's a matter of getting air to the bottom.  If you take a copper pipe and keep dipping it in boiling water you should be able to work it to the bottom and pull it back out and make sure it's not clogged with wax.  Put it back to the bottom and heat the bucket (with hot water) until the wax is loose then dump it out.