The books / Wax and the Solar Melter / chapter 5 of 14
A kilo a year
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
A single average colony, rendered honestly across cappings, burr comb, and whatever old brood comb you cull, gives back roughly one kilogram of clean wax in a normal year. Most of that never comes from a deliberate wax harvest at all: it comes from the cappings sliced off during honey extraction, which run about one to two kilograms of wax for every hundred kilograms of honey pulled, roughly one to two percent of the crop by weight.
A hobbyist extracting twenty-five kilograms of honey from a hive should expect only a quarter to half a kilogram of cappings wax from that harvest alone.
A strong colony in a good flow year, rendered to the last scrap of burr comb and cull frames, can push the same colony to ten or twenty kilograms in a single season.