Tips needed for dealing with cappings and granulated honey in damaged comb

[beekake]

Took the honey off the two hives today. It's not been a bad season, and these last few supers provided about 35lb of runny honey to add to the 70lb of OSR taken in May, and about 5 frames of granulated honey that wouldn't shift (although a couple of frames of comb did implode a couple of times when the extractor was up to speed- quite dramatic!).

The granulated stuff was in frames had been on the hives for a year (before I got them- it was not this year's OSR because that was stored in the upper supers and extracted in May before it went solid), so the decision was made to leave half for the bees (i.e. put back on the hives and then leave them to it), while the other half was cut off the frames (it was delicious) and dumped in the same bucket as all the cappings from this season.

Can anyone provide any suggestion for what to do with all the sticky wax? Should I keep the cappings and comb wax separate and deal with these two different types of wax in a different way? Or should I just try and melt it all down and see what honey can be filtered out/ how much wax can be salvaged.

Any advice appreciated!

 

[tonybloke]

put the wax / honey in a bowl, place on top of feeding board (in an empty super) bees will soon clear it up for you.

 

[dclewis]

Add water to the wax honey mix and wash out the honey, strain off the cappings and wax, sterilise with campden tablets and add whatever fruit or other flavourings you favour and use as your base for hydromel, just dont use too much water to disolve the honey and you can then adjust sweetness to suit your fermentation requirements by adding water to get the right starting specific gravity. Then a lot of patience.

 

[plumberman]

Or, as I saw in a farmers market today, mix honey and cappings and put into a 1lb jar. Market it specifically for hay fever sufferers and charge £5.60 for the jar.

Saw this, but not seriously suggesting it!

 

[tonybloke]

or you can rinse with warm ( not hot enough to melt the wax) water, keep the resulting liquid, use it to make mead.

 

[buzz bee]

Or, as I saw in a farmers market today, mix honey and cappings and put into a 1lb jar. Market it specifically for hay fever sufferers and charge £5.60 for the jar.

Saw this, but not seriously suggesting it!

A friend of mine recently told me that her parents drive several miles to buy their honey from one specific keeper because she sells 'cappings honey'. Basically - just what you mentioned, a jar of cappings toppped up with honey at a grand price.

They wanted to know if I had any. I didn't then, but I might now!