Why do I maintain The Journal? I'm not certain that there is a single reason.
It is a useful record of how, or when, I have completed certain projects. The recipe for a successful dish, or how I have overcome a particular problem with the bees, or a DIY project at home.
It is also a narrative of the second half of my life. What I have done. Who I have worked with, and for. Tales of holidays and events and even the mundane comings and goings of day-to-day life at home. There are even the occasional snapshots from my younger days, before The Journal was started.
I'm not sure that it has any value to anyone else. I sometime wonder whether TP will ever read it to, perhaps, get a better understanding of his father and his life? I am aware, from the blog statistics, that Journal entries are read by casual visitors,* and I can see which entries have been read. It is quite fun to re-read these entries. It is as though I am using these random visitations by unknown persons, to select and review certain days from my past.
Anyway, enough of that, on to today.
After extracting the honey crop back in May, I was left with a quality of sticky wax cappings.** These had been placed in a couple of feeders and placed on hives #1 and #2. In the intervening weeks the bees in those hives had scrupulously cleaned the honey from the cappings and stored it back in the hives.
This morning I finally got my arse in to gear and removed the feeders from the hives. After shooing away a few bees, I settled down to process the cappings. After cleaning by the bees, they look almost like a drift of coarse sawdust. They have a slight sticky texture due to honey remnants and the nature of the wax itself.
Stage one of this process is to melt down the cappings in boiling water. I use an old rice cooker, and I soon had a slightly aromatic brown liquid bubbling away in the cooker. This was poured through an old sieve in to a plastic container and was left to cool for a few hours.
While the wax was cooling I attended to the feeders, which were slightly sticky and the bees had even started to build brace comb*** in them. I found that careful application of a hot air gun, on its lowest setting, would melt the wax and it could be cleaned off with a cloth. The plastic feeders were then put through the dishwasher and have come out beautifully clean.
I then returned to the wax and removed it from the plastic container. The underside of the wax is covered with a layer of black sludge comprised of pollen, and other debris from the hive. This is scraped away to leave a disk of beeswax. It still has impurities and will need to be melted and filtered again before it it suitable for making candles, leather cream or furniture polish ... but that can wait until tomorrow.
My only other achievement was that I grabbed my clippers and gave Wilson a lamb clip. I have to say that he was really very good, and I am very please with the result. I will point out that I have yet to clip his feet, so it does look like he is wearing Ugg boots!
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* I do wonder how they come across an anonymous little blog, that makes no attempt to appeal to the masses, and what they actually think of it when they get here?
** These have to be cut from the honey comb to enable the honey to be harvested
*** Brace comb is a term used to describe the clusters of wax cells that bees will construct in an attempt to fill large spaces; often between the frames and the floor and sides of the hive. In this case, in an attempt to fill the feeder.
