Return on Investment

FINALLY! A return on my investment! I made a candle and a little block of wax out of the burr comb that I scraped out of the Thistle hive a few weeks ago. I gave it to Mom as payment for her letting me fill her backyard with bees :)

And here are the "making of" pictures I took (over the course of several days). First, of course I have to start out with my safety equipment. I've got a baking soda (because you cannot use water on a wax fire, it will explode), a fire extinguisher (for when the baking soda fails), and my cell phone (to call 911 when the apartment is on fire):

Here are my candle making supplies. I've got a strainer and some cheese cloth for straining and purifying the wax, 3 votive molds, some candle mold release spray, and some wicks. Not pictured, I have two pitchers to melt the wax in. I purchased a starter kit from Michael's, it also came with a thermometer and very basic instructions on how not to burn your house down.

 Here I have one of Mom's old crock pots (set to about 250 degrees F) with a metal pitcher inside of it with my burr comb inside of the pitcher. I figured this was safest because wax is not supposed to get above 300 degrees F and you should not melt it over an open flame.

The burr comb contained lots of bee bits and pollen, so once it had melted down, I poured it through the cheese cloth/strainer into my alternate pitcher. This worked really well to take out the larger bee bits.

To get the smaller bits of pollen and honey out, I mixed the wax with water. The debris sinks to the bottom, the wax floats on top of the water. This worked really well to get a lot of the excess honey out, but not too well on the excess pollen. As you can see, once the wax cooled, it still had a lot of pollen specks in it:

I searched online for another method of straining out gunk, and one commenter suggested using old (but clean) pantyhose. So, I put a pair of pantyhose over my strainer and it worked like a charm!

The results were this clean slab of wax (with some pollen still around the edges because I wasn't using a completely clean pitcher... though I'm note really sure how to clean the pitchers... oh well, I'll worry about that later).

I melted down my clean wax again and strained it through pantyhose one more time into my molds. I had enough for one votive and one 1/2 ounce brick of wax. I am using the pencil to hold the wax up straight.

 

Now to figure out how to clean the wax off of everything...