My Attempt at Refining Beeswax

Since beekeeping is high on the list of priorities for the homestead, I was excited when Smoky brought this home:

It's a bit hard to visualize against the orange of the Home Depot bucket.  This is better:

Beeswax!  Smoky found it inside an electrical panel.  It was an abandoned hive.

Amid visions of handcrafted candles and little pots of sweet-smelling unguents, I searched the internet for information on how to best extract and refine the wax.  I found an excellent blog post
at The Lone Star Homestead.  The trick is to slowly melt the wax with water, allowing the impurities and wax to separate.  The theory is that the dirt and bee parts will sink to the bottom and the pure wax will rise to the top.  It's necessary to repeat the melting and cooling process with water a couple of  times before carefully melting the pure wax and straining it through a piece of nylon stocking or cheesecloth.  A pan dedicated to the melting process was in order (you won't want to use it for anything else), so I hopped down to Goodwill to find one.  $8 was more than I wanted to pay, but what I found was heavy gauge stainless steel vessel with a cover and a pouring lip - perfect!

I filled the pan halfway with water and added the wax.  You don't want to overload the pan.

As I was adding the wax, I noticed that it was webby and what looked like dead mites or larvae.

With a sinking heart but hopeful still, I began to heat the pan on a medium-low setting.  Maybe all the webs and whatever-they-were would sink to the bottom.

But no sinking was apparent.   Beeswax was obviously in there, but so were pieces and parts of I don't know what.  Perhaps they were dead bees?

It was a mess.  Still hoping, I put the pan out in the garage where it was cold.  After the top layer hardened, I removed it in pieces.  This is what it looked like:

Obviously, there was beeswax in there (notice it on my fingers), but extracting it was going to be tough.  I decided to try the melting process another time and gauge the results.  Maybe the chunks would fall to the bottom.

They didn't.

With not much prospect of successfully extracting (much less refining) any beeswax, I sadly threw the clumpy stuff away.

No candles.  No creams.  No lip balms.  (Sniff!)

I read up a bit, and have come to the conclusion that this wild hive suffered a wax moth infestation that led to its demise.  Too bad for the bees and too bad for me!  I will have to wait till we have our own hives before I can try this again.