Slumgum

Today I got around to a job that I had been putting off for a while. The day was forecast to be cold, so I committed myself to refining some beeswax in the garage.

Over the course of the beekeeping season I tend to accumulate a reasonable quantity of beeswax and today had been put aside to process it. This is not a job I enjoy. It is messy and there is a significant amount of work to produce perfect, yellow ingots of wax.

In its raw form beeswax is comb; brood comb, brace comb or honeycomb.  The comb is generally contaminated with honey, pollen, bee larvae, their faecal matter and pupal cases and the older the comb, the more contaminated it is.  Old brood comb is black from the accumulation of debris over time.*

So, this morning I settled in the garage, spread sheets on the floor and started to dismantle a dozen old brood combs. In no time I was covered in wax, squashed larvae and smears of honey...

Oh, and I had a heap of comb to process. I do this using an old rice cooker. About a pint of boiling water is added to the cooker and it is switched on. The comb is gradually added and within twenty minutes I have a gently bubbling mass of black pupal casings.  This is poured through a sieve in to a bucket and is left to cool.  A few hours later I am left with a reasonably clean disk of wax floating on a soup of water, pollen and honey.  The disk of wax is rinsed and set to one side.

I repeated this process three more times and I ended up with a reasonable quantity of beeswax that will be ready for the next steps tomorrow.

3lb 3oz cylinder of beeswax

Now I had better explain the title of today's entry. Slumgum is the black, waxy collection of larvae, larval cases, pollen and other debris that is sieved from the melted wax.  Apparently it makes an excellent fire lighter for bonfires.

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* It is good practice to change the brood combs every couple of years to minimise the bacterial and viral load in the hive.