@addy1 idk if I asked this before, how do you harvest bees wax?
When we decap the frames, i.e. cut off the wax caps we get xx amount of wax caps.
This is a picture of a square of honey, the cappings are still on, it is called comb honey. We have xx amount of frames with holes cut in them. The bees draw out the comb, without foundation, we cut it out. You can see the white wax coating. When we extract we spend hours cutting off the wax, from the uncut frames, I use a bread knife, then we spin the frames to extract the honey. That is the wax we get, called cappings. It takes a lot of frames to get the wax, the wax I got was from extracting around 450 frames of honey.
I can extract around 70 frames in a long day. Our extractor does 6 at a time. Some bee keepers use foundation-less frames, they extract by crushing the wax, but then every year the bees have to rebuild all that wax. We treat our drawn frames like gold. After extraction we let the bees clean them, then we freeze for two days, then we dry the frames, then we save them in containers until the next nectar season. By doing that it saves the bees a lot of work.
