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Regrettably we lost our bees over the winter. In fact I got a pretty good telling off by a local bee guy about how bad of a person I was to leave them uncared for over the winter. I had always been under the impression that everyone should be getting a hive in their backyard if they can but this guy had a completely different thought on that. He thinks that nobody but people who make it their career and livelihood should have bees. It’s because of people like me that colony collapse is continuing, or so he scolded me. I felt like a shamed child when he left. And today I finally went out to clean the hive. When we left it had 20 or more full combs of honey when we returned the bees were gone and so was the honey. All that remained were empty combs. 

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I was sad as I scraped out the large delicate architecture of the bees and threw it all in a bag, but at least I’ll put it to use. Here is what I walked away with, at least 5 lbs. of comb. 
I’ve never rendered wax before so followed a blog post off of Pinterest. Yeah I actually did a Pinterest post! This is how it turned out. 

1.	Break up the comb and soak it in cold water…
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 I have a lot of comb to do. This is just one broken up in the bowl and cold water. Honestly I don’t get the point of this step. Yucky stuff will supposedly fall to the bottom of the bowl but so far I’m thinking I can just skip this step. 

2.	Next you skim the floating combs off the top and stuff them into a doubled up stocking. 
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Yeah it looks like shit… 

3.	Line a crockpot (double bag it) and place that doubled up, double knotted stocking of wax into the crockpot with a good amount of water in it. And then turn it to low so that after a couple hours the wax has melted and filtered out of the stocking. You’re not supposed to squeeze out the stocking according to the directions I read but I’m not so sure about that either. I might attempt it to see what happens. But I didn’t with this first batch. (I’ve got about 10 batches to do though). 

4.	When the stocking is looking pretty deflated like this… 
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 Remove it and I guess just throw it out. I put it in this ziplock because wax gets everywhere and I figured this would keep it contained at least a bit. Plus I wanted to see what I got out of all those combs both the nasty stuff and the clean wax.

5.	Next turn off the crockpot and let the wax cool overnight where it will thicken on top of the water. I think I should have gotten more but a lot stuck to the sides of the bag, I’m going to try to fix that during the next batch.   
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6.	This step is to admire what you got! Look at that bowl full of clean wax. I’m surprised that I didn’t get more but I suppose when you think about it there’s the yucky stuff and all the wax that I lost to sticking to the bags and combs are pretty light so I guess I should weigh things next time and see what I really get out of it.  
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7.	The last step is to collect all this beautiful clean wax, melt it into molds, and then use it. When I do I’ll hook you all up with the how and what of what I use it for. I’m thinking some candles, balms, and those trendy press and seal wax clothes that are all the rage right now and sell for 17.99 on Amazon for 2. I’m pretty sure those will be a hit for the holidays. 

Until next time, don’t hate me too much for being an irresponsible bee owner. I’ll probably try to raise bees again but until then I’ll grow a ton of flowers for all the other bees to help them out instead. 

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