Filtering beeswax

How blessed I am to know someone who keeps bees and has given me the wax to work with! I was so excited to get this stuff, but needed to process it into a usable form. After some quick internet research, I learned I needed to perform a water extraction followed by filtering. Let's get to work! Start with your raw material, which is a mixture of wax, honey and other gunk.

Scoop onto a piece of cut unbleached muslin cloth or cheesecloth (I prefer muslin after trying both) and wrap into a tight bundle using rubberbands (I knew I saved those asparagus rubber bands for a reason!). After doing this a few times, I recommend forming a "sack" with the top of the bundle being tied together (like you would a garbage bag).

Boil the bundle/s in a large pot of water. Use a very large pot in case the liquid boils over if you aren't watching it closely, as the wax is flammable. I let it boil for an hour or so.

Remove the bundles using tongs, and squeeze out the liquid. The bundles reduce in size by quite a bit, so make sure your rubberbands are tighter than mine were. If you do your bundles in sacks, you won't have this problem.

If you are curious like me, take a peek at what you filtered out. It is mostly just brown "stuff".

The liquid in the pot will be a mixture of honey water and the wax will float to the top. Let it cool. This takes a very long time. Best to boil your wax in the evening, and let the liquid cool overnight. 

Remove your crudely filtered wax pancake from the top of the pot and let it dry on a cooling rack. Then break it apart into a glass measuring cup or some other heat resistant container with a pour spout. Melt in a double boiler, a pan/pot/crockpot filled with water, or microwave. 

Assemble a funnel/muslin filter above another glass measuring cup. I placed a metal tea diffuser/strainer inside of a wide mouth canning funnel, with  muslin cloth underneath the metal strainer. This forms a double strainer. Or simply place muslin at the bottom of a funnel. Once your wax is melted in the double boiler, you have to work fast. Pour it through your filter. Then take the filtered wax and pour into your mold.

The finished beeswax is a brilliant yellow color and has retained its fragrance. 

Cleanup is a tough job. Place your measuring cups in the freezer to cool the wax and make it easily removable from the glass. Use brillo pads and vegetable oil to remove wax from your metal pot and other utensils.