If you keep bees, you end up with lots of wax.  Folks who like comb honey or who manage top bar hives will have much more, but even those of you who use an extractor will collect a lot of cappings.

Our movie star neighbor solved the excess beeswax problem by making 110 candles.  (He hasn't quite figure out how to solve the excess candles problem....)

The first step was to clean the beeswax.  He melts his wax in an olive oil can partially full of water atop a pot of boiling water, then uses a seive to dip out any gunk that floats to the surface.  (This waxy debris makes great firestarters, our neighbor points out.)  After the wax is mostly clean, pour it into a five gallon bucket to cool, then pour off the water once the wax has solidified.  You should be able to pop the solid wax right out of your bucket, but then will need to scrape more gunk off the bottom until you're left with beautiful, clean wax.

Knock the wax into chunks with a hammer and melt it again in a fresh olive oil can, still atop a pot of boiling water.  If you don't want to mess your kitchen up, lay down some newspapers, and also set up a broom or other pole between two chairs.  Cut wick material (about $2 for more than you'll ever use) into lengths twice as long as you want your finished candles to be.  Then start dipping.

If your wax is the perfect temperature, it will coat the wick thickly but won't drip off excessively.  A little cooler is generally better than a little hotter since cooler wax stays on much better --- you'll know if you've gone too cold because the wax will be a bit chunky.

Our neighbor found it useful to keep three cans of wax melting at all times, pouring melted wax into the foremost can so that it was always full enough to dip a candle.

After dunking the wick the first time, wait until the wax is partly cool, then stretch the candle out with your fingers so that the candle straightens.  You may need to repeat this procedure after the second dipping as well, but after that, you can just dip, cool, and dip again.

You'll notice in the pictures that our neighbor makes two candles out of each wick.  This method makes it easy for him to drape the candles over his rod and let them cool between dippings.  Later, he'll cut the wick and end up with a pair of candles.

Our neighbor dipped each candle about 25 to 30 times, which means it took him six to seven hours (and about two gallons of clean wax) to make 80 candles plus 30 tea lights.  The tea lights were to use up excess wax at the end of the project and are made from a small piece of wick inside a cleaned out applesauce container.

Previous batches of handmade candles have gone to the Harvest Table Restaurant, where they were priced at $5 per pair.  However, our neighbor notes that they didn't sell nearly as well as honey (which went like hotcakes.)  On the other hand, the yellow, honey-scented candles hanging on his wall always attract the attention of guests, so he's had no problem giving them away to loving homes.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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