Making stuff with bees wax

bee producing wax

To one degree or another bee keepers will find themselves building up amounts of bees wax.

The wax in the frames needs to be replaced from time to time, particularly the brood frames that can get quite black. This is a build of general muck and particularly brood poo.
Its recommended you change  third of the frames each year. Its important as the queen won't lay eggs in dirty comb.

Also the wax in frames can be damaged and need to be replaced.
I have done blogs on collecting wax from extraction and also the use of a steam extractor..

The wax I get from the steam extractor mostly comes from old brood frames and isn't as clean as the cappings wax which is usually bright yellow.

So what to do with it?

I use some of the 'brood' wax for general repairs to frames and to stick things together.

Once the wax has been cleaned it can be traded in against the cost of new sheets of wax and the Bedfordshire Bee Keepers Association run this sort of scheme. The cost of sheets of foundation to members of the Association is about half the normal retail price.

However for most beeks, particularly if they do markets, the wax is used to make candles and furniture polish.

Making polish is easy, if a little pointless as few people have wooden furniture.
Its just a mixture of bees wax, I use the brood wax as its colour isn't important, turpentine. and carnauba wax.
Its important to use pure turpentine not turpentine substitute.
You can buy artists  turpentine by Winsor and Newton for £5.25 75ml but I get it from eBay for £8.50 500 ml
Carnauba wax comes from the leaves of a palm tree only found in North Eastern Brazil.
INTERESTING FACT - Keith of The Little Smokehouse tells me its used to make the shiny shells of Smarties.

There are a variety of different ways of making candles but I don't have the patience for most of them.
I have tried to make moulds by covering a suitable figure/toy with layers of latex but it was a pain and didn't come out well.
Dipping candles also takes too long so I just use silicone candle moulds.
I use the cappings wax as the candles are quite yellow and nicer to look at. Most of the candles are sold to kids and I don't think any of the candles are actually lit.

Here are videos of how I make the polish and candles.

December Bee News

The Bees

As the weather gets colder, the activity gets less but I still get the occasional nutter who makes it across the field to The Shed.

I still have a look every day at the Ravensden bees as I take The Boys for a walk and clear any corpses from the landing boards. During the Summer the corpses are left on the landing boards to dry out and get lighter making it easier for the worker bees to get rid of them. In Winter when they can't fly they just drag them out of the hive on to the landing board

A bit of a disaster happened today [22/11].
The bees in Ravensden are in a copse across a field about 150 yards from the back gate of my garden and I can normally get to the bees by walking around the field. The field is usually seeded but there's a headland around the field.
Today its been ploughed right up to the perimeter hedgerows meaning it's very difficult to walk around the outside of the field to get to the bees and impossible to get any equipment like supers to or from the bees.

A full super can weigh 30lbs and its no fun trying to wheelbarrow up to a dozen of them across a field.
It looks like I'm going to have to move the bees, possibly to Scald End. A job so mind boggling awful it makes me feel dizzy.
Its not ideal as with the number of bees I now have, there are benefits in having two apiaries at least three miles apart so I might have to find a friendly local farmer.
We are away for Christmas and the New Year so I will have to forget this until we're back.

Whats that bee?

I have often mentioned the confusion there is about bees and that people often cannot tell one type from another.
On a blog I follow the writer said there are two pubs near him in Newcastle called the Bee Hive.
This is the sign outside one.

He didn't have the nerve to go inside and point out the sign has Bumblebees on it and they don't live in bee hives.

The other one does have a bee hive [a skep] on it but again the sign has bumblebees.

I did a quick image search on Google for Bee Hive pub signs and these aren't the only ones that are wrong.

Solitary Bee Houses

I have finished the [slightly] newer version of the solitary bee house.
It has a release box underneath which hopefully might mean the emerging female bees will use the channels again.

I've mucked around with the nesting channels. Initially they were wide enough for mason bees, the most likely bee to nest. Leafcutter bees make a smaller channel in the wild so I have put some smaller channels on the outside of the blocks and drilled some holes in the middle of the blocks to have removable straws that are big enough for the mason bees,

I think I will sell them at markets next year and include a copy of the Little Book of Solitary Bees, a booklet about siting the house and how to deal with the cocoons and also a couple of tubs to store the cocoons in. Probably ~£18.

Obviously the Solitary Bee market is booming as in direct competition to my bee house the Flow Hive people, producers of the bee hive that's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, have produced their own Flow Bee House.

It doesn't seem to be on sale outside Australia and they are charging about £50. Its a limited edition and made from off cuts from the Flow Hive. All profits go to charity.
Its a lovely looking thing  and will look great sited next to people's Flow Hives, but is essentially a lot of bamboo canes in a box. It suffers from the usual problem with these sorts of things in that the tubes can't be cleaned so parasites and disease will build up.
As usual they produce a lovely video about the hive that makes you feel all warm inside and has lots of bees and smiling children in it [The children are in the video not the hive, that would be silly].

Making feeders

Not only is Winter time for dull routine chores, it's also time to try and set up a few new things for the coming season
After the autumn feeding I brought back the feeders to be cleaned and stored for use in the Spring.
When we first started bee keeping we bought whats called a Miller feeder. Its a tray that sits on top of the frames and has a slot the bees can climb up and syrup is stored in a reservoir. The wall to the reservoir has slots so the syrup can be accessed by the bees without them drowning
They're nice things and can hold a lot of syrup so I thought I might buy some more. That is until I found out they cost £50 each.
So I made one and it cost about £10.

Bees making Comb

In the wild bees make lovely sheets of wax comb.

Although fine for them, its very inconvenient for us as its a difficult and messy process to get the honey for our porridge. So we make them make their comb in neat wooden frames in a bee hive

This is a time lapse video of  bees making comb naturally albeit it in a glass observation hive.