I’ve got maybe a wee bit carried away. I had a brainwave and an enabler (what more can anyone want), so we rigged up a contraption so that I could make 10-13 moulded beeswax candles at a time instead of 1 or 2. Oh, the excitement of it all!
Morning and evening (in between my real job), I heated and poured candles, I dislodged the cooled solid shapes from my expanding collection of silicon moulds, rethreaded the wicks and started again. Until I ran out of wax. Only then did I turn around to see that on the table beside me they had mushroomed! Like amoeba, one doubled to two to four to eight to sixteen….! There’s skeps and trees and snowmen, blobs and snowflakes, tealight-bees and angels, all with little white wicks sticking up out their tops hopefully.
There was nothing for it but to render more wax.
Clearing out every scrap of old comb that we could find, my enabler couldn’t help himself, he got sucked into my world. Mind you, I have more than one enabler. It was during that time that I went to take ApiVar* off some hives and my mentor had a surprise waiting for me. Two large buckets of dirty bits of beeswax! It had, he said “…been lying around for 15 years.”. That’s the stuff that normal people would look at in disgust and chuck in a bin ASAP. Me? I took it with glee, saliva dripping from my mouth. This, and my own leftovers, produced even more lovely clean blocks of wax than the first lot.
So, I’m off again making candles like good-oh… or I would be if I had room on the table.
Video about how to use Api Var to contro varra mite – skip to 2.00 min if you want to see what it looks like but don’t want to hear all the guff.
My post Floor Wax includes how I render beeswax
Double, double toil and trouble includes a bit about how I clean the frames to get the wax to render. The beer barrel has been successfully re-purposed to render bees wax this year in an attempt to keep beeswax off my kitchen floor!
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