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Monday, December 14. 2009

Beeswax candles

Bees produce honey. That's what every child learns. Later in life you might possibly realize, that honey isn't the only thing that is produced by bees. Bees produce wax, too. A lot of it. That kind of wax that smells like honey. That kind of wax that is used to make candles that are bought by many people as presents during this time of the year. That kind of candles that fill many apartments with their distinguished smell of comfort and winter.

Let me show you, step by step, what you get when you take 6 people and a hell lot of beeswax... (picture heavy):

Here it is: Our beeswax. One block of it. Looking slightly strange after being stored in a cellar for decades.

I'm not kidding. That block of beeswax is at least 25 years old.

With a big knife and manly strength it breaks apart and shows it's inner beauty.

If you look closely you can not only see an old special offer for coffee, but also the typical yellow color of beeswax. And if we had invented the smelly computer for everyone, than you would be able to smell honey.

Now we started to clean the blocks. Without knowing what happened over the last 25 years, and not knowing what the beemaster already did to them, we decided to scrape off the outer layer of the blocks.

This photo was done while one of us was cleaning a smaller piece of the block.

And here you can see how much waste we produced during that process.

In the next step we needed to meld the wax. To do this, someone decided on taking the inner parts of an electric kettle.

That kettle stopped working some time ago, and it was taken apart, because the metallic pot inside of it makes a good pot for things that make a lot of dirt and need a pot. Although this photo was done while we were cleaning up, I still think some people might like to see it.

The kettle leftover was put into a water quench and we threw the wax into it. The wax melted and started to smell like honey. The color was also honeylike, but it did not look very edible.

The last step during the preparation of our candle making project was to clean the beeswax. For this we used an old diaper. Not those that you get in supermarkets nowadays but one of the very old diapers that were made out of fabric.

And here we go: Filtering the wax.

This dirt was collected in the diaper with only filtering some of the wax.

Dirt reduces the quality of the candles. So the wax needs to be filtered at least once before you use it. Of course you don't have to do that when you buy special beeswax for your candles at a store.

Here is our melted beeswax. Much cleaner than before and very comfortable to look at.

After all the preparation is finished, we can start to make our candles. The wick needs to be held into the proper direction. It has a beginning and an end. If you don't have the right side up your candles won't burn later. So be careful and let someone explain to you how you find out which side is the upper one when you buy the wick.

We tied our wicks at sticks. Then we dipped the wicks into the beeswax and pulled them out again. When the wax had cooled down a little bit, the wicks were straightened. This needs to be done to get straight candles later. We dipped the wicks into the beeswax again and again. Every time a new layer of wax stayed on the wick and slowly a candle started to form.

It's a very long process to get candles that way, so some of us improved the procedure by making a several candles at once. A maximum of 3 candles was possible. More just didn't fit into the kettle.

Here's a photo of some of the candles. The long wax parts that form at the bottom of the candles can be cut off until you find the wick. We just threw the parts we cutted off back into the melted wax.

Dipping the candles in. Pulling them out. Queueing up. Dipping in... pulling out... queueing up... and so on... Which Queue?

Do that until your candle is thick enough.

Some of our finished candles. The leftover wicks can be recycled for other candles.

If you look closely, you see something wrapped into a yellow litterbag in the upper right corner of the picture. That's just a little bit more beeswax, that we didn't need for our candles.

To test various methods to make candles we used some molds. Those molds were basically recycled food boxes.

In one test we found out, that the bottom of those boxes make nice candle tops. We made tiny holes into the bottom of the boxes and put the upper ends of the wicks through them. The bottom parts of the wicks were fastened at the top of the boxes, so that they go straight through the candles later.

Here's the beeswax filled into the forms. After it started to solidify we had to loosen the wicks at the top of the boxes, because the wax started to shrink a little bit.