Wax Recovery and Honey Extraction with EdCC Bee Club

I attended the Wax Recovery event (on 1/17/18 for an hour and a half) and the Honey Extraction (on 2/16/17 for 4 hours) put on by Mary Whitfield and Bee Club, contact is mary.whitefield@edcc.edu or bee_club@edmail.edcc.edu.

For the Wax Recovery event, our goal was to take frames from the beehives, scrape the wax from them, then filter and boil down the wax to get rid of impurities. I helped with collecting the beeswax, as others were pulling and scraping it from the frames. Then I helped in rinsing mesh bags filled with wax. After the mesh bags had been run through water a few times, I then got to boil the wax over a burner, in a metal pot filled with boiling water. As the wax melted into the pot, the dirt and other unwanted things were left inside the mesh bag. The wax was then left in the pot and let pool to the top to settle and harden for us to use at our honey extraction. (Process can be seen in images above to the left and right)

During the honey extraction, our goal was to get honey from other beehive frames and continue refining the wax from the previous event. I was on wax duty for this event because I had done the honey extraction last quarter, and I wanted to learn more about the wax process. Again, we boiled down water, broke up the wax from our previous event, and added it to small cans to be put into the boiling water. I found out that wax had to be in a double boiler to prevent fires because wax is very flammable. (Question One) This made me want to understand why candles are burned the way they are and why when having the wick on fire,  it doesn’t catch the wax on fire as well. (Question two) I also began to wonder if we were losing wax when boiling it down. I was thinking that since wax seems to disappear when you light a candle and it burns, the same would be happening when you boil it down. (Question three) I also wanted to know why some of the waxes came out different colors when we were filtering it out. As you can see in images below, from left to right, it started out an even golden color and as it melted became darker and then as we filtered on the rag and smaller cloth, there were many shades of golden to brown wax left over. I found out that it was because pollen and other dirt wasn’t being fully taken out of the wax, it was also settling at the bottom of our can when pouring it out and the end would be the darkest and have things floating around in it.

We talked about different kinds of bees that we could purchase, there were two types we were mainly looking at, Carniolan honey bee (Scientific name: Apis mellifera carnica, Phylum: Arthropoda) and Italian honey bees (Scientific name: Apis mellifera ligustica, Phylum: Arthropoda) . These are the main bees bought and sold in the area because they are supposed to survive well in these conditions. Selection plays a part in humans wanting to save bees for honey as well as wanting to select only the bees best for honey production to profit off of. (Question four) This made me wonder if there are other bees that might be better for our campus or which would be the best. If we have two hives and have one of each bee, it makes me wonder if that would have effect on their survival as well. I know in the past the campus has had both types of bees, but at different times, but the last two years the bees have not survived through the whole year. I also wonder who the common ancestor between these bees are, if they are now extinct, or if it might be a breed that could be brought here and might survive even better. Mary informed us of putting up a wasp guard after finding that one beehive was lost, but then found that the wasps still took out the remaining hive last quarter. Because the wasps took out the bee colonies, even with protection that is supposed to keep out wasps, I wonder if this means the wasps have adapted to the methods being used to keep them out, how old this method was and what other methods may be more successful.

Seeing how many people came out to this event to learn more was great! Many people had never done any honey extractions or anything with wax. It gave us a chance to connect with our community by learning more about our campus and meeting other students who are in different classes and some that are from different countries. These experiences are helping me learn more about the delicacy of our ecosystems and how important it is for us to get involved in our communities. As a society, I believe we need to become more sustainable. Events like this give us the opportunity to teach others on more sustainable practices, as well as show them products made in our community and cut down the need to import items that aren’t as fresh.

The potential impacts of this experience are a variety of things. Just having beehives is an impact on our environment, as pollinators are an important part of our fragile ecosystem. The opportunities for our community to learn more by experiencing first hand how to care for bees and harvest the honey and the wax. Another incredible impact, as I mentioned before, is that people get a chance to experience how easy and fulfilling it is to make products ourselves in a way that creates more sustainability, as well as the satisfaction of getting to do something as a part of a team who work together to get a job done. Everything we did was affordable and natural, made right in our own area with no shipping needed. This impacts the environment by leaving a smaller footprint on our natural resources.

Photos by: Jackson Blann, Cammie Edwards, and Jayden Stipek