The books / Wax and the Solar Melter / chapter 10 of 14
Filtering and grades
All chapters
- Seven kilos of honey for one of wax
- Why drawn comb is never thrown away
- Cappings, the clean wax
- Old brood comb
- A kilo a year
- Never direct heat
- The double boiler
- The solar melter
- The steam melter
- Filtering and grades
- Rotating the brood comb
- What wax is worth
- Drawing comb costs stores
- What a kilo can become
What comes off any melter still needs filtering before it is worth selling. The first pass, straight off the heat, is coarse: cheesecloth or a paint-strainer bag catches bee parts, propolis flakes, and other debris large enough to see. A second pass through a much finer mesh, one hundred to two hundred microns, or an old nylon stocking after a re-melt, is what turns a rough block into something a cosmetics or candle buyer will accept.
The market sorts what you produce into a handful of grades:
- Cappings wax, palest and most valuable.
- Rendered and filtered wax, yellow and generally useful.
- Unfiltered rough block, dark and sold at an industrial discount.
- Pharmaceutical or cosmetic grade, filtered multiple times and sometimes bleached, which commands the highest price of all.
One extra filtering pass is often the cheapest upgrade you can make to a batch.