The first step in recycling your own wax is to get it out from your misshaped too old and your badly drawn combs. Next step is to make your own foundation from this wax, if you use foundation.
You can render your wax in more than one way, electrical way, firewooden way and solar way. I use the last two. When the bees don’t fly I use the old stoves that were used in old days to warm water to wash your clothes. I warm the water to get steam that melt the wax out of the frames. The wax and the water boil together until I have melted wax out of 7-10 boxes. Then I pour it out of the tap through a strainer into buckets. I stir it to get water together with the wax in all buckets. The first bucket will hold mostly only water, which I throw, if possible on a compost. To begin with it’s 4 buckets of water. I get two or three buckets that will settle until next day.
When a box of frames are empty of everything (well not entirely) I bang them a little at the side of the box and put them in the other big pot with water to clean the frames. I use no additive in the water, just plain water. That’s enough and no further rinsing is necessary. Bees don’t like the additives and they are difficult to get rid of from the frames. A heavy weight holds down the frames under water. And you need good insulated waterproof gloves.
The next day I take care of the wax in the buckets. The debris and water at the bottom goes to the compost. If the wax is as small pebbles at the bottom or mixed with some debris, that goes into a bucket, where also the debris that is piled off from the bottom with the help of a little axe. That “waxdebris” is later melted again with the help of a little steam cooker for making juice from berries. But once you used it for wax I bet no one wants to use it for juice.
