The books / Wax and the Solar Melter / chapter 4 of 14

Old brood comb

All chapters
  1. Seven kilos of honey for one of wax
  2. Why drawn comb is never thrown away
  3. Cappings, the clean wax
  4. Old brood comb
  5. A kilo a year
  6. Never direct heat
  7. The double boiler
  8. The solar melter
  9. The steam melter
  10. Filtering and grades
  11. Rotating the brood comb
  12. What wax is worth
  13. Drawing comb costs stores
  14. What a kilo can become

Old brood comb looks like wax and burns like wax, but a surprising share of its weight is not wax at all. Every brood cycle leaves behind a cocoon, a thin silk lining spun by the larva, plus propolis and frass the colony never fully removes, and after several cycles that residue can account for thirty to fifty percent of the comb's total mass.

Render a frame of genuinely old, black comb and expect to recover only thirty to fifty percent of it as clean wax, with the very darkest, most heavily used comb sometimes giving back as little as ten to twenty percent.

None of that makes old brood comb worthless; it is simply a different product from cappings, darker, lower yielding, and priced accordingly.

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