Still Life

Not quite a Dutch masterwork, I admit, but I added a fruit bowl to provide a bit of scale. Our neighbour found this by-product of the honey harvest intriguing. I suppose it's a detail of the process that only beekeepers usually see and no-one pays much attention to

Having brought honeycomb home, the first step in extraction is to remove the thin wax caps with which the bees have sealed each cell. There are several alternative ways to do this: a heated knife blade, a blow heater, much like a hair dryer, scoring or scraping the surface to disrupt the cappings, using any one of numerous ingenious tools. We use a wide, fine-tined fork that can be slipped under the cappings and then pulled away from the comb to lift them off. Do this over a bowl, and the collected cappings sooner or later fall off the fork and into the bowl

Inevitably, some honey comes away with the cappings, so the bowl is eventually full of a sticky, mangled mess of partly-compressed wax flakes coated with honey. Our efforts yesterday produced two large mixing bowls full. After all the extraction was complete I piled the sticky wax on to the stainless-steel double-filter through which all the honey has already passed, and left the whole edifice sitting over a bowl like this. By morning, there was enough in the bowl to put in the recycled jars on the right - about 0.5kg (plus a modest serving that went on breakfast toast and porridge) 

There may be a few more drips before we get around to washing the wax with distilled water, melting it in a double-saucepan and pouring it through muslin into moulds {probably empty yoghurt pots!) Cappings wax is the cleanest, whitest wax to come out of the hive. Usually we just use it for best-quality candles, but have dabbled with beeswax cloths and lip balm in the past