Take the slum gum and compress it into blocks. Makes excellent fire bricks. Beekeeper friends give us bee box size blocks of it. Works wonderful in outside fire pit. Burns long, hot, and clean.
@@brucesbees I wonder if putting a piece of parchment paper under the slumgum would be an easier clean up rather than scraping it loose? Then the paper towels. We also use the slumgum as fire starters with the paper towels we use.
Hey thanks for the tip. It is a little bit of a pain to scrape it out. I might need to try that. Have actually found that the paper towels are not really necessary.
Just use an old worn out shirt you plan to throw out anyway instead of new paper towels each time , it is so much more long lasting and durable and you can just use it over and again and no risk of it getting a tear ruining your wax letting trash through. I've been solar melting since the 1980s. Paper Towels are too delicate and they are not free. The solar trap also helps kill hive beetles and wax moths because they smell the hot wax at dusk and fly in through the gaps, lay eggs and are cooked each new day. Gotta love a solar melter for that alone.
I haven’t seen one of these before. By far the easiest process I’ve seen, and with excellent results! The kind of thing a club could own, each keeper would only need it for a few days!
This method is fantastic. I just took an old garden planter, threw some Perspex over it, lined the inside with foil (woodglued to the sides) and it's 60+C inside the box (maybe higher, it broke my digital room thermometer), 25C outdoors, the wax is melting through some old bedcloth on a metal cooking tray with some holes drilled at the end, pretty much a recycle-DIY. It's coming out nice and clear first time. No burning stove energy and messy clean up.
I'm not actually a bee keeper, so I've never tried, but I've seen videos on RU-vid that other beekeepers that use the slum gum to bait their swarm traps. That's the only thing I believe I've heard it used for.
I have this same wax melter and I have never thought about putting paper towels up against the great, so I just learn something 😃 . Now this is going to save me a lot of time. Thanks for sharing my friend.
Bruce, that looks so much easier and cleaner than my crockpot and filtering the way I do. Those paper towels will make excellent kindling to start a fire with! I’ve got to where I put the slum gum in the soil of my wife’s flower beds. It all comes from Mother Earth why not give it back to her in a good way instead of a garbage dump? Great video!
I don't use a solar melter, but I do use paper towel. What I found is that if there is any gap in the paper towel, some of the dirt particles will find their way through the gap. In my set up, all the wax goes on top of a solid single sheet of paper towel and filters down through it. This limits me to a small amount of wax at one time, but it yields 100% clean wax in a single melt.
These are the kinds of videos I subscribed to this channel for a good while back. There have been too many hour plus videos of people yapping as of recently. Hope you get back to more of this style soon!
Great video. Makes wax melting easy. I save the chunks of slum-gum and rub it on the insides of new brood boxes. I think it gives the bees a welcoming aroma inside the box.
Hi Bruce, nice video! You reinforced my thoughts to save all my comb from the fall and wait to use the solar melter. It works so much better than boiling comb! Thanks again for the video!
Always worth having a few bait hives scattered about for catching swarms. Slumgum is an excellent bee attractant if you rub a bit inside your bait hives.
My brother my brother!!! This was BRILLIANT! I have been keeping bees for 12 years and I have never seen anything like this before. I’ve always done this the hard way. On the stove or in the oven. Thank you so much for this video. I am ordering right this minute. Many blessings to you and your family.
If ya want to try and build 1 yourself, they are like a solar dehydrators, thought of building 1 to dehydrate vegetables on a larger scale, never though about using 1 for bees wax. Subgum is real good for your garden from what I've been told. Ty for sharing Bruce, Blessed Days...
❤I use thé same technique thé dirty stuff I use it on the compost, very good fertiliser. And thé towel paper I cut it in long pieces and use it as à barbeque lighter .
The Slumgum can be used for starting fires. I use a small amount in each section of a cupcake pan to form pieces that I can use for starting my brush piles on fire. If you live in the country as I do, it seems like I always have a brush pile to burn, when it's safe. I also use a small, very small, chunk of it (1"x1"x1/8" maximum) piece to start my smoker, works great.
You can compost the slum gum into a fertiliser or it makes a great fire starter. The block is so much cleaner & easier than rendering it in boiling water
Best solar melter I've used hands down .. 70 degrees and sunny all it needs to start melting .. they were really cheap 130.00 sounds like they went up. Like to buy the larger one or just buy second one. I know you can make them and I've done that few different designs but worked nothing like this lyson .. only way I can get it clean is in my lyson solar melter
Out of curiosity, do you have any idea why this one seems to work so much better than the DIY ones you tried? As someone who loves a good DIY project, I saw this video and thought to myself that it seemed like a great idea to add to my list of plans for my bee DIY equipment. But if the manufactured version truly works that much better than what I would DIY, then it may not be worth it (or it could be a challenge for me to overcome by improving the design lol).
I don’t think I have ever tried to do a DIY project with the solar wax melter. There are a lot of videos of people who have. Sometimes I prefer to just buy products. Not the best at DIY. Maybe you could give it a try. Might be fun. It’s just easier and more efficient for me to buy one already made.
Gold Bricks. On the gunk. I've been thinking of using a wax press. Immediately toss filter bag with slum into press while still dripping with wax and squeeze the hot wax out. Next batch I will try it out. Having a steamer would possibly be handy to melt wax off press.
We take the slumgum and press them down into clumps and sell them as Bear "Turd" firestarters. I think half the people buying them use them as firestarters and the other half give them to someone as a gag gift! Quite popular though.
Exactly how I do it but I use a homemade one. Those paper towels are the key but I do sometimes get honey in my wax as well (sometimes) Slumgum the inside of your swarm traps😁
Slum gum can be ground to a powder, and made into a dust for chicken feed. High protein boost for the youngster's immune system. It might interfere with laying hens, though.
That is amazing how clean that was for 1 run. Thanks for showing that. You probably just sold a bunch of them for better bee. Lol call them up and tell them you need your cut.
Wow!! Thanks for sharing this. I held off from processing because I see the crockpot or pot melting method is labor intensive. This seems way easier. Looks pretty clean on a 1st run!
I love a solar wax melter. So easy and requires minimal time to process so you can spend more time keeping bees. A side note, I save a little of the slum gum and freeze it to kill any beetle eggs larva that might survive and then I use a few small pieces to bait my swarm traps.
I used to soak my cappings and burr comb in a bucket of water to pre-clean it. Then stuffed into nylon stocking to drip dry before placing in my home-made solar wax melter. Unfortunately, if there was any trapped honey in the burr comb that washing couldn't eliminate it caused some spotting in the block of clean wax. Adding a baffle at the drip edge with paper towels would probably have solved my problem.
Swarm traps, n smoker fuel, good uses for slum gum... I also saw comments saying to use it in plants?? I almost wonder if some of the animals could eat it? I mean it's cocoons, maybe dead brood, Lil wax, maybe some bee bread,& and propolis?? Idk 🤷♀️
Bigger one they sell can put old plastic frames inside for few minutes then the old comb just peels off nice and easy foundation is nice and clean doit right
@@brucesbees small detail, but if you aren't already, I would be intentional about how the edges of those towels overlap - layering kinda like shingles so that the wax can't sneak between them unfiltered. Hopefully that makes sense...
Back in the '80s I'd take my cappings and renderings wax to Western Bee Supply in Polson, MT for bee supplies, mostly foundation. They didn't have stuff like Mannlake has now days. I need queen grabbers. I need a queen marking restraint device. I have made several, but I'd like the real thing I see from others. I need a source of swarm commander. Or I need a cheaper source of lemongrass oil. Over 9 bucks for .5 oz is outragious at mt Gesunthiest health store for "essential oils". And my local bee keeping supply store will gladly sell me a ceramic skep honey jar -- which I DO NOT need or want. Can I get oxalic acid? Do not know yet.
Hello, I am a beekeeper from Argentina. Can you provide me with an Amazon link to purchase that wax extractor? Because I haven't found any similar ones here... Excellent content!
@@brucesbees I didn't notice it until near the middle of the video. That's a good thing. Sometimes music is a certain style as to only appeal to certain people and often is just too loud.. You did a nice job.
Yeah it’s amazing how fast it can add up. I started keeping the burr comb that I scrape when going through hives. I’m sure it will also work well with wax cappings from the honey harvest.
@@brucesbees last year I only had one hive, right now looking at 4, and a couple resources hives ... providing the queens hatch and come back. Hopefully it will add up quickly, but I think I'm still in the building stages.
For sure. Take your time. For years I have used a crock pot and still may do that some if I want the wax to be perfectly clean. I put a link in the description of how I do that.
