Fun and Facts about Wax

Last week I was the speaker at my local bee club meeting.  I have given lots of talks and wanted to try something different so I talked about Fun and Facts about Wax!  I covered a lot of facts about wax and then talked about melting it, employing it in making candles, lip balm, lotion, swarm lure, etc., and ended with enjoying it.

I am giving the same talk at the Potato Creek Beekeepers Club in Griffin, GA on Thursday, November 20 at 7 PM - here's where they meet in case any of you are in the area and want to come:
Spalding County Extension Office, located at 835 Memorial Dr., Griffin, GA 30224

A few fun facts that I had such fun collecting!

• Wax has been found in shipwrecks that is extremely old and still is a lovely product
• Beeswax has always been valued because it burns slowly and without smoke
• Back in 181 BC (a long, long, long time ago) the Romans conquered the Corsicans and then taxed the Corsicans 100,000 pounds of beeswax a year
• Like honey from China is contaminated with things other than honey, wax in ancient times was often extended with things like sand so guilds developed to protect the purity of the product.  Some of those guilds are still in existence today
• One pound of beeswax supports 22 pounds of honey - that means that in a medium ten frame box, which full of honey holds about 40 pounds (4 pounds/frame), the amount of beeswax in that same box would be a little less than 2 pounds.

I could go on and on.....so many fun facts to learn about wax.  

Of course one of the most important facts about wax is that if you are not going to use it right away, don't let the wax moths have a feast.  Store it in your freezer!

I get asked a lot to give talks but this was a particularly fun one - I think because often I am talking about topics that get controversial reactions - like foundationless frames, crush and strain honey harvesting, simple beekeeping.  

This topic was universally accepted and I think everyone there enjoyed the talk - or at least a lot of people came up afterward to tell me they did.

Potato Creek is a new bee club which I am proud to support.  GBA has a number of new bee clubs and this one was just welcomed into GBA at the fall meeting.  So if you are around, come to the meeting on November 20 and hear my talk about Fun and Facts about Wax!

(Bear Kelley, president of the Georgia Beekeepers Association and 2014 Beekeeper of the Year, is the speaker in October:  On the 16th)

Goody Bags for Short Course

Our MABA Short Course is this Saturday - it's been full at about 110 people for the last two weeks.  Julia and I are chairing it for next year so we have to pay close attention this year to make sure we have an idea of what we will be doing.

One of my volunteer tasks this year was to make the lip balm for the goody bags that the participants take home.  The bags have a lot of items in them - catalogs from bee companies, lists of local bee suppliers, resource lists of Internet and other resources (including this blog ;-}), a small jar of honey, a small candle, and a tube of lip balm - guess whose job it was to make the lip balm?

Mine.

So tonight I poured 100 tubes of lip balm.  We already have a few more to make up the 112 or so that we need.

First I melted wax in the Presto Pot:

Then I set up my pouring tray with fifty lip balm tubes (I get them from Majestic Mountain Sage).  I got orange tops for the tubes so they wouldn't get lost in the Goody bag!

So I melted the wax.  In a Dutch oven filled with simmering water, I put my oversized measuring cup.  I put into that 1/2 cup plus 4 T of sweet almond oil, 1 tsp honey, 1 tsp cocoa butter (had to heat it with my hair dryer to allow me to scoop out a teaspoon), 1 tsp vitamin E oil, 9 T beeswax, melted.

All of this sits in the hot water until I am ready to pour.  Then I pour it in the tubes.  Notice I set the pouring tray on a sheet of wax paper in a cookie sheet.  This makes for a clean work surface and any drips can be scraped off of the wax paper with a rubber spatula and remelted, but you couldn't do that off of the counter.

I scrape off the excess from the tray and remelt it.  Then I refill the tray, make the mixture again and fill another 50 tubes.  The recipe will fill about 40 - 50 tubes.

Finally I capped the tubes with the cute orange tops:

Tomorrow night I'll print and put on the labels, but for now, I'm off to bed.  If you try to make lip balm and have any helpful hints, please post them in the comments section below.

Introducing Buckhead to Bees and Beekeeping

Yesterday my friend Jay and I had a table at the Buckhead Heritage Festival to show how bees are kept.  Jay brought his observation hive and honey to sell.  I brought bee veils for the kids to try on, honeycomb to pick up, honey to taste, and lip balm to sell.  We had a great time and the groups that stopped by our table were enthusiastic.

Jay talking to kids about his observation hive.

Me, talking to one of our many child visitors.

Everyone looked for the queen but we never found her (she's probably in the box below instead of walking around on the frame that was lifted up).

Here are pictures of the many kids in bee veils who stopped, tried them on and were willing to have their picture taken.

They had a great time and so did we!

Julia Child with Wax and Oil

I had four assignments at the Southeast Organic Beekeepers Conference:

1. To do a talk for the advanced beekeepers on How to Prepare Honey and Wax for Competition.

I enjoyed doing that so much. Most of the audience had never entered a honey contest. I was so grateful that I had gone to a lecture by Robert Brewer in 2008 at the state meeting of the Georgia Beekeepers Association and had heard him talk on the subject.

Most of all I was glad that I have entered honey contests ever since I started beekeeping five years ago. I've learned a lot from every wax pour and from pouring each jar of honey. And I've won a lot of ribbons! So I covered liquid honey, chunk honey, cut comb honey and wax blocks. I learned a lot by organizing what I know into a PowerPoint presentation.

2. To talk to the beginning beekeepers about Honey Harvest from the Bee Hive to the Jar.

Most of them were, as many new beekeepers are, a little overwhelmed by how to get the honey harvested. I of course talked about the simple honey harvest that I do. I used a PowerPoint to show them how to harvest with minimal clean-up, a simple approach to the bees, and honey without extraction. This talk was only about liquid honey. I also showed my movie on harvesting honey via Crush and Strain .

3. To talk and demonstrate how to make lip balm and lotion from the wax from the hive.

I felt a little like Julia Child, essentially cooking in front of everyone. The whole conference was there - advanced and beginners....so about 60 people.



I had a burner to use to melt the ingredients on, but in the end we used the much more effective stove in the kitchen. I showed them how it is helpful to use a chopstick to stir - chopsticks are just great and I use them a lot in various aspects of beekeeping.



Here I am, thanks to my friend from Beemaster, JP, who generously took these pictures. I am using a syringe to squirt the liquid lip balm into tiny lip balm containers. I had lots of help with this project. Brendhan and Eric manned the kitchen stove and cut wax, Janel went out to buy all the ingredients and supplies, and others help cap the containers when I was done.



I also mixed up lotion for everyone, but that takes about 2 1/2 hours to cool so they went on to other activities while the lotion was in the blenders for 2 or more hours. I had brought samples of the lotion bars that I had made at home a couple of nights before, so I used ice trays that I bought at WalMart to make everyone tiny lotion bars as well.



In the end all of the participants went home with a lip balm, a jar of lotion and a lotion bar. Everyone had fun doing this, I think.

4. I was supposed to help judge the honey show.

Dr. Mikhail Kruglyakov, a Robert Brewer trained honey judge, came to judge the show and I was to be his steward. I learned so much. I own a refractometer and didn't know how to use it and he showed me. He also showed me how to examine a jar of honey from start to finish and write notes about it for the entrant. He was a lovely person and very kind and encouraging. We had very few entries into the show but tried to write good comments to help the entrants learn for the next show.

I hope that I can take the Welsh honey judge training at Young Harris in 2011 (if I get Master Beekeeper this year - otherwise I'll be taking the exam again in 2011).

Garden Club Talk about Bees

On Monday night I gave a talk to a garden club in Stone Mountain, GA on being a beekeeper. I took an empty 8 frame medium hive box, screened bottom board, super and some frames. I took a frame of pollen, a frame of partially drawn comb, and a fully capped frame of honey to show them.

The meeting was a group of men and women who were quite interested in the bees and asked all kinds of questions. I let them taste honey from my bees and gave them all lip balm in tin watch cases (see picture). I passed around a beeswax candle and let them try the lotion that I had just finished the night before. I also handed out a sheet of bee facts that I had gotten from various places.

I was a little scared since the only other talk I had given to non-beekeepers was at the Atlanta History Center in October. This garden club talk went really well and they asked good questions. As it turned out, the hardest part was finding the house where the garden club met, although now that I have a phone with a GPS system as part of it, I never get completely lost!

My next scheduled talk is on Feb 25 when I will be talking to the Henderson Mill 5th grade school garden club at their after school meeting - that should be fun.

Learning about Lip Balm

I made my first attempt at making lip balm today and it turned out OK - not great, but I learned a lot. Here's what I did:

1. I bought Coconut oil (organic and virgin) from the Internet
2. I bought 100 containers from the Internet and some from the Container store
3. I bought 1" circular mirrors from EBay
4. I followed the recipe in Kim Flottum's book: The Backyard Beekeeper.
5. I weighed and melted the wax
6. I put the glass jar of coconut oil into a boiling water bath to melt it
7. When both were melted and both were 150 degrees F, I stirred them together.

Now the problems start. The recipe said to take the mixture off of the heat and stir in the vanilla and honey. As soon as I took the mixture off of the heat, it started solidifying. I poured in the honey and vanilla but they never really mixed well despite my using a whisk.

So I put the glass measuring cup with the mixture in it on top of one of the boiling water baths with the burner turned off and the mixture came together much better. I filled the containers by using a syringe that the pharmacist at Target gave me. I put the container filled cookie sheet right beside the boiling water bath on top of which sat the balm mixture so that it wouldn't solidify before getting into the container.

Filling the containers wasn't easy - somewhat messy, but I succeeded in filling 90 small containers and five larger ones. As they cooled I realized that in about 20 of them, the honey/vanilla mixture was on the bottom of the lip balm and that those would not be usable because there was liquid below the balm mixture.

I don't know if I can wash and re-use these containers - I hope so - it's a lot of effort if I have to throw out 20 of them.

My camera lens had a smudge on it, but I made a slide show anyway to show you the pictures:

Preview of Coming Attractions!

Tonight I took Step One toward making lip balm out of my prize winning wax block - seems a shame to grate it up, but that's the direction I'll be taking.

I'm planning to use the recipe in The Backyard Beekeeper to make lip balm for Christmas presents. Tonight I found coconut oil (an essential ingredient) on the web and ordered it!

Here's the recipe:

1 cup shredded beeswax
14 oz coconut oil (what I ordered are 2 bottles - each 14 oz - of coconut oil)
5 Tbsp honey
5 Tbsp vanilla extract (I have great Mexican vanilla extract)

Heat the wax in a saucepan over low heat to 150 degrees. In a separate saucepan, heat the oil to the same temperature. When both are heated to the proper temperature, add the coconut oil to the beeswax, remove the pan from heat, and stir steadily until well blended. then add the honey and the vanilla extract. Continue to stir until well blended. Pour into tubes or tubs, allow to cool overnight, and then cap the containers and store at room temperature, out of direct sunlight.

Well, I'm fired up to do this - the recipe above makes 100 .15 ounce tubes of lip balm or 65 1/3 ounce pots. I've already been to the Container Store and have bought a few pots for the lip balm - we'll see how it turns out. The coconut oil has been ordered from a place in Texas and I'm ready to do this.

I found a great Internet site for making lip balm. Her site led me to another good site about lip balm. And in further exploring I found these tins to put the lip balm in. Goodness, after all of this ordering stuff, I hope I actually can successfully make lip balm!

Since next week is Thanksgiving, I imagine that this will be a post-Thanksgiving project - but you know I'll record it for this blog!