09/25/2026
What in the world are we cooking on a late Friday afternoon??? Some folks boil up shrimp or crawfish perhaps even parboil some chicken to throw on the grill for a fine supper after a hard weeks worth of work. This is a nice gentle boil of wax cappings. After we drain the cappings for about 4 or 5 days stirring them occasionally in our uncapping tank, I then take what's left and put out for the bees to get as much residual honey as they can from the cappings. Wax cappings are exactly as they sound. When a bee is done filling the cell with honey and the moisture content is right they put beeswax over the tops of the cells. During the extraction process I remove all these caps with a very sharp serrated knife. I then extract our honey and this can become candles, lip balms, and hand cream stuff.
The cappings are placed in a pot with some water in it and brought to a boil to separate the wax from all the other impurities and then strained through a fine mesh filter bag. I will keep you posted as we go so you can see a little bit more of our process. A lot of times folks don't know where stuff came from hundreds of years ago and how some folks still make it nowadays by homesteaders and small-time folks like me.