How to Build a Solar Wax Melter

If you keep bees with a top bar hive, you're likely to wind up with plenty of nice comb that can be melted down for beeswax.

I created a highly makeshift solar wax melter last summer, but will need something a little larger and more sturdy this year, since it looks like I'll soon be processing a fair amount of comb from my dead hives (sigh).

Here's a good article on harvesting honey and beeswax from a top bar hive. In addition, the government of Queensland has been good enough to provide this overview on beekeeping, beeswax, and solar wax melters, with some good tips, warnings and tricks.

Here's a roundup of instructions for making a solar wax melter.

• The always informative Linda's Bees blog has a nice video and pictures of how she made her solar wax melter.
• Ron Bennett's solar wax melter Plans.
• Beesource's downloadable plans for building a solar wax melter.
• Paul's ingenious solar wax melter. (This is the one I used last year. Couldn't be simpler.)
• This page has many do-it-yourself plans. Scroll down the page to see the solar wax melter.

Bee Collage of Bee Collages

At least one of these wonderful bee-collages incorporates beeswax along with imagination—can you tell which one?
1. Beekeeper, 2. bee, 3. Bee Cup, 4. Bee Cup, 5. Bee Tea - 2008, 6. Queen Edith, 7. The Bee tattoo, 8. Sentiment, 9. Queen Of Bees - ATC ACEO

Learn more about beeswax collages.

Clorox Buys Burt's Bees—The Juicy Backstory

“The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money.”—Burt Shavitz, co-founder of Burt's Bees

I've always wanted to know the story behind Burt's Bees, whose lip balms have been close companions of mine over many a dry and windy season.
It's been impossible not to notice the company's meteoric expansion over the past couple of years; whereas once the product was found mainly in health food stores and food coops, it now seems that kiosks and endcaps featuring Burt's Bees products are springing up everywhere, from large grocery store chains like Hannafords and Whole Foods to fancy cosmetics vendors in midtown Manhattan. All this has made me wonder who that bearded man on the Burt's Bees package really is and what lies behind the exponential growth of this brand. (Which, by the way, delivers an excellent product.) I've also wondered about the beekeeping practices utilized at Burt's Bees, which emphasizes the idea of "all-natural" in its branding strategy.

Beekeeping practices are not the main subject of the fascinating New York Times article about Burt's Bees that appeared this weekend, but in the article you will learn:

* That all the beeswax used in Burt's Bees products comes from Ethiopia;

* Plenty of (semi-)juicy gossip about the company's co-founders;

* Details of the rather amazing saga of the company's recent purchase by Clorox for a whopping $913 million;

* That Burt Shavitz lives (by choice) in a modestly renovated turkey coop;

* The range of sustainable practices undertaken by Burt's Bees;

* and much, much more.

The article provides an intriguing glimpse into the odd bedfellows coming into being as large corporations seek to "shack up" with green businesses that offer impressive bottom lines and, potentially, a green-hued halo effect for even the most eco-hostile corporation. Only time will tell if Clorox will make good on its promise to embrace some of Burt's Bees earth-friendly practices, or whether this is just another instance of bleaching the green out of Green.

A Calm Interlude

With the swarm busily establishing itself in the new Rebel Rebel hive—no longer a swarm, really, but "kept" bees—my attention once again turned to the more relaxing beekeeping-related pleasures I'd envisioned when first taking up this pursuit: photographing the bees on flowers, learning the names of forage plants I wasn't already familiar with (who knew there were so many kinds of clover?!), watching the bees come and go in the bee yard, trying to spot "my" bees on my daily walks through the fields, working my way through Maurice Maeterlinck's captivating book, The Life of the Bee, and consorting with the locals.
During this relative lull, I also built a delightfully low tech solar wax melter to convert bits of culled comb into gobs of that wonderful, aromatic substance known as beeswax. Using materials at hand and applying my Amateur Hour Carpentry can-do spirit, I had my melter built in twenty minutes.

Take one tin can and add some water (for the melted wax to suspend in). Create a sieve using a paper towel.

Place comb on sieve. (The comb I'm getting now is small; I'll use a bigger container once I begin harvesting larger pieces of comb. This year, I am leaving the bees everything I can so they're well provisioned while getting established. Next year, there may be honeycomb to spare. If so, we will eat the honey and melt the comb.)

Place can with comb in an insulated container—in this case, an old styrofoam box I got at the Park Slope Food Coop.

Cover with glass (or, in this case, an old plastic cutting board).

Let the sun shine in!

After a day in the hot sun, my solar wax melter had yielded a sweet-scented nugget of gold reminiscent of a lunar crescent. The moon, we now find, is made not of green cheese, but of beeswax.

One of the neat things about beeswax is its color variation. Here's a comparison of the results of my first two "meltdowns." (If only all my meltdowns were this productive!)

In time, as pieces of off-center comb are culled and honeycomb is harvested, there should be a good supply of comb to melt down. Then we can start making lip balm, hand lotion, candles, and maybe even crayons. Who doesn't like a good, homemade crayon?

By the way, beeswax is secreted from the honeybee worker's abdomen during the comb-building process, yet another in the bees' seemingly unending store of fabulous talents bordering on the surreal.