The books / Wax and the Solar Melter / chapter 9 of 14
The steam melter
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 steam melter trades money for speed and for a rendering method that finally does justice to dark comb. Live steam at a full one hundred degrees Celsius pushes through the wax and debris far harder than a water bath or the sun ever manages, clearing a batch in thirty to ninety minutes rather than the hours a solar melter needs.
The unit itself is the most expensive of the three, running from one hundred and fifty to six hundred, and steaming does cost some of the wax's natural aroma along the way. For a beekeeper working through a genuine backlog of dark comb rather than a season's cappings, that trade is usually worth making.