- Joined
- Sep 4, 2011
- Messages
- 5,205
- Reaction score
- 4,679
- Location
- Wiveliscombe
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 24
Sadly I'm not quite done yet as I forgot I have a box of frames in another apiary to extract the wax from, but today I gathered together all of the extracted wax that I've largely been ignoring for quite a few years now...
By the time I'm done I'd guess there'll probably be about 30kg. It pains me to think how much honey that represents. Perhaps not far short of a quarter of a tonne? Maybe around £4,000 worth at today's prices? Some of it is cappings or out of brood frames which I'm replacing over time so there's little choice about getting the bees to make wax for those, but some is from melted down super frames of OSR honey that set hard because I failed to be organised enough to extract it in time, and therefore my own fault
At the moment my plan is to turn most of it into foundation/starter strips, but I'm thinking the convenient thing to do would be to clean it up and turn it into half kilo bars or something like that to make storage a bit less of a jumble and then if I want it for something else it should be easy to organise. It has been coarsely filtered as it came out of the extractor, but probably still contains a bit of water, plenty of pollen and small bits of junk from the hives. A few are a bit mouldy on the outside because, ahem, someone left the cakes out in the rain.
What would the panel suggest is the best way forward at this point?
James
By the time I'm done I'd guess there'll probably be about 30kg. It pains me to think how much honey that represents. Perhaps not far short of a quarter of a tonne? Maybe around £4,000 worth at today's prices? Some of it is cappings or out of brood frames which I'm replacing over time so there's little choice about getting the bees to make wax for those, but some is from melted down super frames of OSR honey that set hard because I failed to be organised enough to extract it in time, and therefore my own fault
At the moment my plan is to turn most of it into foundation/starter strips, but I'm thinking the convenient thing to do would be to clean it up and turn it into half kilo bars or something like that to make storage a bit less of a jumble and then if I want it for something else it should be easy to organise. It has been coarsely filtered as it came out of the extractor, but probably still contains a bit of water, plenty of pollen and small bits of junk from the hives. A few are a bit mouldy on the outside because, ahem, someone left the cakes out in the rain.
What would the panel suggest is the best way forward at this point?
James
