How to Render Beeswax for Candlemaking

Reader Contribution by Betty Taylor
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Many beekeepers discard their wax cappings after honey harvest or simply forget about them until the wax moths have found and destroyed them. You may be one of them, thinking that rendering beeswax is too hard, is too expensive, or takes too much time. I am going to share a simple and inexpensive way to render beautiful, sweet-smelling cakes of beeswax from your cappings that does not require expensive solar or water-jacketed wax melters. You can find most of the necessary equipment in thrift shops or maybe your own garage or storage area.

The setup I’ve devised uses an old plastic cooler, a light fixture like the type used in a chicken coop with a 100-watt bulb, a foil pan to place in the bottom of the cooler, and some sort of rack to hold the light bulb up off the wax cappings in the foil pan. The rack in the picture is the base of an old-fashioned food mill that I bought at a garage sale. Dedicate all your equipment to melting wax because you’ll never get it clean again!

1. Put your wax cappings in the foil pan. The pan should be sized to cover most of the bottom of your cooler. Put the pan in the cooler, put the rack over the pan, put the light fixture over the rack, close the lid and plug it in! If your lid does not close all the way, you can use a sheet of foil to keep the heat in. 

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