Nice sunny day and decided to clean up the last of the seasons rejected combs.
These were mainly older brood combs which had significant areas of unusable comb. Built a wallpaper steamer stack and extracted wax whilst knocking out couple of boxes of previously steamed frames.
Put a stainless steel washing machine drum on a few bricks to use as a brazier, bunged in a few dry previously steamed out combs as fuel, put a bbq grill over hole and then a 5 gallon stockpot with some rainwater. Filled pot with all my various buckets of wax cappings scrapings and odd bits then lit old combs beneath and kept filling up pot as wax melted. Have to keep an eye on it or can boil which spoils wax.
Is now slowly cooling overnight and after tipping out will scrape off crud from bottom and should have a decent cylinder of cleanish wax for future conversion for foundation. Fun bit of recycling.
These were mainly older brood combs which had significant areas of unusable comb. Built a wallpaper steamer stack and extracted wax whilst knocking out couple of boxes of previously steamed frames.
Put a stainless steel washing machine drum on a few bricks to use as a brazier, bunged in a few dry previously steamed out combs as fuel, put a bbq grill over hole and then a 5 gallon stockpot with some rainwater. Filled pot with all my various buckets of wax cappings scrapings and odd bits then lit old combs beneath and kept filling up pot as wax melted. Have to keep an eye on it or can boil which spoils wax.
Is now slowly cooling overnight and after tipping out will scrape off crud from bottom and should have a decent cylinder of cleanish wax for future conversion for foundation. Fun bit of recycling.