Summer Bee Keeping Activities Part 5 - Repurposing Beeswax

As summer quickly comes to a close, the race is on to build up the bee colonies in our late-season splits to ensure strong, healthy hives with lots of bees head into the cold winter just around the corner.

How do you build up a bee colony in the late summer month of September, you might ask? Good question. The answer is to feed, feed, feed... and repurpose beeswax.

Photo: The beeswax cappings from our Summer Wildflower honey harvest is a valuable commodity that can be repurposed for many uses, such as waxing frames, candles and more.

Beeswax is a very important element in the bee hive. In fact, I have heard it said that it is a bee keeper's most important asset. By this they are referring more to the beeswax in the hive (their nest) than beeswax itself (although that can be valuable too).

To put things in perspective, it requires bees to eat 8-10 pounds of honey from their hive for them to produce 1 pound of beeswax to be used in the hive. A lot of time and energy in bee keeping is put into managing the bees making beeswax, so the bees can store eggs, brood, pollen and honey in the hive. Without the beeswax, there would be no hive!

So why not repurpose beeswax cappings from our honey harvest to help new hives (splits) build more beeswax in their hives? Great idea!

Photos/video: We use a 5 gallon paint strainer and hot water to remove any honey still left in the wax cappings, so that what we are left with is pure unfiltered beeswax ready to be repurposed.

Currently, we are not collecting enough beeswax from our honey harvests to do anything too exciting with it, like making candles or other fun beeswax items (maybe next year!). However, with beeswax selling at about $10/pound bulk, it does save us some money to repurpose the beeswax from our honey harvests to be used for building up our late-season splits.

You can read more about the process of repurposing beeswax in a post from the Spring. That post goes into detail about melting the wax in an old crock pot and waxing the frames to be placed into new/building up hives.

Blessings,

Jeff