Hi, everyone!
Welcome back to Cody's Lab. So, back in 2014 i had a bunch of hives die and i ended up
Recovering a lot of the honey that, was still in the hives and, you know, I crushed the comb
And i put it inside of this thing here
Then I ran it through a strainer to recover most of the honey, but
This, here, were the waxes that was retained, by the screen
Still contains a lot of honey. Let's zoom in on this here. So you can see the wax is very gooey
And, in fact. what happened here is the screen eventually got plugged up and then the
Honey, actually crystallized in the wax. This happens very quickly
To honey that has wax in it because the wax
You know, the sharp edges so after it breaks, it acts as nucleation sites so the honey can
Crystallize very quickly. So this thing here is a nice hard lump of
wax honey mixture. It's probably actually, by weight, mostly honey and
I ended up saving it
It's been sitting down in my parents basement for a long time. I think today I'm finally going to recover the honey from it
and the wax, too, I guess
so , move the camera here
See, on the stove, I've got two pans
One that's slightly smaller than the other, and the space between them is filled with water
Can you see this one's kind of floating? I've got a double boiler set up
What i'm gonna do is take this big lump of wax
assuming it'll fit
I'm gonna stick this down inside of this pot
I'm gonna render it
and recover
the honey and wax
so
There we go
Now just get this water out here warming up. That'll soften the honey. You know, you know
Liquify the honey and soften and melt the wax
The wax will float as it
Liquefies because it's less dense than honey, and the honey will settle to the bottom with in between, we have all the
contaminants like the
pieces of dead
Moth for instance. Let's turn on the stove
This will take a very long time, because I want to heat it slowly and
The wax takes a lot of energy to melt, and
The honey doesn't have a very good thermal conductivity so this could take hours to melt this thoroughly
So, it's been a couple hours. Let's see how it's doing
All right. So, it looks like it's all melted. You can see a layer of wax. Oh, I fogged up my camera
Floating on top of the honey. You can't really see the honey but it's down there
there's a bunch of crud floating in here
That a lot of that is pollen and
Maybe some paper cocoons from the bees
Because i wasn't using a clean excluder. A lot of this is also probably the
Wax moth. Yeah, there's a wax moth cocoon right there
So, you've got like little silk filaments
I'm not going to worry too much about it for now. I can filter that out later
What I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off the stove
And then just let this cool
And then once it's solid, we can peel this wax up off of the honey
And that should take all the impurities with it
It's been a little over 24 hours since I turned off the heating
and you see that it's all cooled off
And the wax is even separated from the pan a little bit
See how it shrinks as it cools. You can see the honey is peeking up there
So, to get this wax off the honey, I've got a fork here
Which I've bent the tines a little bit so it's like a hook
so I can reach underneath
Then pull up. The honey does kind of create suction so it's - Gonna have to pull slowly here
And there we go
Nice chunk of wax
There it is
Gonna have to
I'm going to have to remelt this and run it through a filter to get rid of all this gunk
There you go!
And all the honey is just dripping off into the pan
This honey is now cooked honey, so all the
microbial
Benefits of it, you know the pollen and stuff, all that's been destroyed, so now it's basically just flavored sugar
but that's alright. I can use it for
You know, baking or maybe making mead. This would be good stuff to make mead out of. i mean, I've already
sanitized it, so
As you can see, I've washed all the honey off the wax. I
Let it dry. and then I broke it into pieces. and I've got it into my wax melter here
So the wax is now melted. I'm gonna ladle it out
Through this fine mesh sieve here
This is to get rid of all those little bits of
Stuff that was floating in the wax earlier
Some of this might actually be propolis, now that I think about it
Yeah, that's a lot of what gives
Beeswax its color
it's made from tree sap and
Other materials that the bees bring back to the hive. Normally, they use it to seal things up.
They also use it to disinfect everything
And bees also track around on their feet
And so it gets all over the wax. If the wax is completely new, like the bees have just made it
You know, just extruded it out of their abdomens as fat
Wax is bee fat, by the way
When it's brand new, it's, white. It doesn't have that propolis in it
It also won't smell much different than
Pure white candle wax, either
So, you can see that some finer particles did make it through the sieve
But, they do settle out to the bottom of the wax, so I can just scrape them off after the wax is solidified
So I've decided to put the honey into some glass jars
And, before it goes into the jar, I'm going to run it through a little bit of a sieve here to take out
Any bits of material that didn't float out with the wax
So, this'll probably take a little while
Yeah, there's definitely some bits of stuff in there
Parts of bees and things like that
if you guys think that's gross
That I'd be eating something that's got pieces of bug in it, like, you know
Honeybee legs and stuff, keep in mind that chocolate bars are allowed to have six insect legs in them, too, and sold commercially, so
It's not that big of a deal
One thing that I would like to mention about this is a lot of people say that if the honey's been cooked then it's
Okay to feed young children
That is not true
The Botulism spores, they do not - They are not killed
By boiling water, and I haven't had that any hotter than the temperature the water boils
Like, it was probably somewhat less than
Boiling point of water, so this would still be something I wouldn't feed to an infant, but if you
Have like a piece of hard candy made from honey, that's probably fine, because it's been heated to a high enough temperature
In case you're wondering what honey tastes like after you've done this to it, it usually has a stronger taste
Because it absorbs some stuff from the wax. In fact
This honey tastes about like beeswax smells
you know, on top of the original honey flavor
Sometimes it can be so bad that the honey will, like, burn your throat
On the way down
Because it's so strong but if it's mixed with something, like you're baking bread or something, then it's fine
This batch is pretty good, I think. I could eat this just straight
There we go
Managed to fill
About four and a half jars, so that's over a gallon of honey that I was able to recover
it's really dark, as you can see
I think this'll be pretty good
Still haven't quite decided what I'm gonna use it for. I think
A lot of it, I might end up making honey wine out of
But that'll be a video for another time
And here's the beeswax, now that it's all cooled off
You can see the part that I need to scrape off there
So this block weighs just over two pounds, and this is another
Few ounces there, so, you know, it's
A little over a kilogram worth of beeswax here
And that's what I've had sitting in a bucket for
What, is it almost four years now?
Actually four years
I'll probably a post on the main channel, a video
Comparing beeswax to paraffin wax, here pretty soon
The beeswax, things like it's a little bit denser
much higher melting point and
Sticks to the container more as it cools
Yeah I'll do a video comparing these two
You guys can probably tell I've been
Working with quite a lot of wax lately
So yeah
Hope you enjoyed. I'll see you next time
So the video that you guys just watched was originally intended to go up on the second channel, Cody'sBLab, as part of the
Beekeeping series, which i'm redoing. If you guys have been subscribed me for a long time, you'll know
That I used to do a lot of beekeeping videos, and I still want to do beekeeping videos and so I'm actually redoing
A large chunk of them and posting up on the second channel
So that I'm able to focus more on the science videos for this channel
Most of my subscribers have come on board for the science videos, but there's still a lot of people who like the bees, and so
I'm posting most of the bee stuff over there
First episode's already out, so if you guys want to go check it out, it'll be down in the description
The second episode has been delayed a little bit, you guys can thank MatPat for that
I've got most of it filmed. I'm gonna finish that up this weekend, and it'll be posted early next week
This video didn't really fit in with the
Schedule of videos that I had planned, and it was really just tying up a loose end from the original series
And also, I didn't have anything to post on the main channel this weekend. The project I was working on fell through, and you know,
I don't have any time to work on anything until Monday
So, I hope to see you over on the second channel. Until next time. See you then