Official Newsletter of the Regina & District Bee Club, 2018 Winter Only Two More Months Until Bee Season Begins Your Bee Club is excited to bring you our winter wax newsletter. In This Issue Upcoming Events What do do with Wax Characteristics of Success Be Part of Our Healthy Hive Your Thoughts! A New Club Web Site Past Event Reports 2017 Saskatchewan Beekeepers' Convention Report 2018 Membership Renewal It's that time of the year again. Please buy or renew your membership to our club. As a volunteer group, we are created by members for members. Your annual $25 fee includes: Free admission into the day-long Annual General Meeting and training day March 10th Educational Classes Field Days Mentorship Program Informative Quarterly Newsletter Bulk Shipping Program Apivar Purchase Program Club Extractor Rental Program Drawn Comb Program Nuc Purchase Program Products for Sale Listing on the Club Web Site - a new web site is coming soon!!! According to the Club's constitution, anyone who pays the membership fee becomes a member with the same rights and privileges. To be on the membership list, a membership application must be completed and the fee submitted to the Regina and District Bee Club. The fee is for one fiscal year ending January 31st. It's also time to order 2018 spring Nucs The number of nucs available will be dependent on weather and subject to availability from suppliers. Orders will be filled in order received by the club. Members ordering nucs must sign a Nuc Waiver Form. Payment and, if applicable, signed NUC Waiver must accompany completed form. This year's nuc price is $285. Click here now to buy/renew your membership, purchase nucs and RSVP for the AGM. Upcoming Events For more details, check out our Facebook page and web site in the coming weeks. Candle Making workshop Sunday, February 4, 2018 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Ironworkers Hall Only two spaces left. Register Here Annual General Meeting March 10, 2018 9:30 a.m. Registration 10:00 a.m.-4:00 pm. Meeting Regina Travelodge Free admission for all 2018 Bee Club Members Provincial Apiculturist Geoff Wilson will explain the new antibiotic laws impacting beekeepers BeeMaid is coming and will deliver orders to Regina that day. Door prizes and silent auction. Check our Facebook page for more details available soon. Renew your 2018 Membership and RSVP Now. Introductory Beekeeping Class Saturday, April 21 Hamilton Apiaries Check our Facebook page for more details available soon. Bee-utiful! Donated by bee club member turned wood artist Ron Houston, this stunning inlayed wood cutting board will be available as a silent auction item at our AGM. If you've got items that you'd like to donate as door prizes or silent auction items - big, small, we'll take them all - please let us know. We're also looking for table sponsors at $60 each so we can cover some of the event costs. To donate or sponsor, contact Louise Yates on Facebook Private Message or at [email protected] What To Do With Wax By Karen Pedersen Honey is a by-product of honeybees in Saskatchewan and beeswax is a by-product of honey. What do you do with the wax? This article will only discuss getting the wax into a product for bulk sale. Candle making, creams and other value added versions of beeswax are all worthy of their own article. Basic facts about beeswax: 1. Beeswax is lighter than both honey and water. That means it will float on top of it much like oil floats on top of water. 2. Beeswax melts at a 62-64⁰C, a higher temperature than that required to liquefy honey. 3. It takes approximately 10 units of honey to make 1 unit of beeswax. 4. Beeswax flakes will initiate honey crystallizing so in Saskatchewan it is particularly important to remove the beeswax from the honey often so that the honey remains liquid to work with. 5. Beeswax is messy and hard to clean up. 6. The impurities in beeswax will give you slumgum when you melt beeswax. 7. Melted beeswax, will naturally be different colours. The older the wax (brood combs), the darker the wax will be as compared to new wax (cappings wax). 8. Melting old brood combs yields mostly slumgum and little wax. We do not consider the wax pays for the energy expended to do it. 9. No matter what method you use to process beeswax, the time spent to process the wax will be disproportionately large to the value of the wax. Unless you have a reason for producing beeswax, try to reduce the volume produced. You won’t get 10 times the price for beeswax over honey, so it’s uneconomical to produce. “Bee space” (10 mm), is the perfect distance between combs to minimize wax production. If the space is larger or smaller, the bees will fill the space with wax. The 10 frame Langstroth super is meant for 10 frames based on “bee space”. They will build more bridge comb between the combs the fewer frames that you run in a box giving you more wax. Stripping your honey regularly to prevent swarming and crystallization also stops them from jamming with wax. Take as little wax off as possible when uncapping your combs. The less beeswax the bees build, the less beeswax you have to deal with and the more honey you will get. There are 5 different ways to separate wax from honey. They are settling, spinning, pressing, straining and melting. Settling and melting are a part of every beeswax processing system. Settling means any time the honey sits, the wax floats to the top. The wax can be skimmed off the top or the honey can be drained out the bottom. It depends on gravity and will happen with no help from us as long as the honey is liquid. Even chunks of bridge comb that have been scraped off will lose some of the honey to the bottom of the container through settling. Remember that wax sitting on the honey promotes crystallization. Spinning and pressing are optional wax processes which many large processors use. They are used to get the honey out of the wax that has first been separated by settling. They result in a fairly dry, crumbly wax product that still has to be processed again through melting, but it does get most of the honey out of the wax. My experience with them is that they are messy, time consuming and still leave a lot of wax in the honey that has gone through the process. The spinners, presses and augers need constant supervision. They provide one more opportunity for honey to be dripped on equipment and the floor as it is being fed into the machine and some of the machines either throw honey and wax out or squirt honey and wax out as the pressure increases behind it. The honey that goes through the machine still has a lot of small pieces of wax in it that still promote crystallization. However, I found that pressing was better for getting the honey out of the chunks of bridge comb than either settling or spinning. I don’t think they are practical for a hobbyist. Straining/filtering is most often used to get the last of the wax out of honey before the honey is packed. The honey must be liquid, but strainers or filters plug up very quickly with beeswax. As a result they are only practical for honey that has already had most of the wax eliminated by another method -- they are not practical for lots of wax. Like the other methods, the wax that is collected will have to be processed again. Melting is always the last method of processing beeswax for bulk sale. Melting can be problematic because, it can caramelize/burn the honey if the temperature is too high, turning the honey into toxic waste. However, we have had good success with either a solar wax melter or a hotwater jacketed wax melter that stays at a very low temperature. Both basically settle the honey out at a slightly higher temperature. If I was a hobby beekeeper, I would be tempted to build a solar wax melter. My second choice would be to use a double boiler. A solar wax melter will separate honey from beeswax. However, both will end up in the same pan and you will have to pour the honey off and melt the wax again. Be careful, because this too can caramelize honey. Eventually, you will have mostly the wax left and you can melt it down. This is a good video to show how to build a solar wax melter and use it to do the final filtration of the wax. If you use this wax melter to separate out the honey, just leave out the paper towel. A solar wax melter worked well, but could not keep up to the capacity of wax that we were producing. In a double boiler keep the temperature low and settle the honey out of the wax. Skim the wax off of the honey and put it into a pot with hot water. Push the slumgum down into the water with some form of screen. Cool the pot and remove the water and slumgum. Melt the wax again in the pot and poor it into a wax pan through a strainer cloth. In either case, cool the wax in the pan in a warm room. The longer it takes to cool, the less likely it is to crack in the mold.