After the crush and strain process we use to collect honey we are left with some wax as a by product. At first we were using most of the wax to paint new starter strips (the strips of wood at the top of a frame that we let the bees draw their own comb from) Now we are beginning to slowly amass a collection of wax we can use for other purposes like candles, wood polish, lip balms, etc.
Once we've filtered the honey out of the crushed comb we end up with a bag of crumbly wax which is covered in honey. I rinse this off in the faucet with hot water till it's clean as I can get it.
I used to wring it out and squeeze it into a ball at this point to get as much water out as possible but now I've found that a little water in the mix can actually be useful.
Next I dump the wax into our handy little double boiler. This was a gift at a white elephant Christmas exchange that has become our dedicated wax melter. It's just the right size and has a Teflon coating which makes clean up easy.
I have an old clear coffee cup that is also dedicated to the bee's wax collection. A scrap of metal screen serves as the strainer. You wouldn't want to use your kitchen strainer for this because there is residual wax that collects on it which is darn near impossible to completely remove without solvents.
Here's the hot wax poured into the cup, still cooling. that brown stripe at the bottom is water. I have found that a little water serves a useful function in that the heavier particles that make it through the screen sink to this area and don't end up in the wax.
The last step (I didn't get a picture of this one) is, once the wax has cooled to near room temperature, put the cup in the freezer. This is the easiest way to get the wax to release from the cup. The wax contracts and the water expands as it freezes so all you have to do is slip a knife between the edge of the wax, down to the icy sludge at the bottom and it comes right out. You could probably also just set it on the counter till the ice melts but I haven't had the patience for that yet.
Rinse the ice off the bottom with hot water or just leave it in the sink till it goes a way (again patience) and you have a nice clean plug of beeswax.
cross posted at the backward beekeepers blog:
Beehuman.blogspot.com
So when Kirk came over I was thinking that we would take some of the deep frames and cut them down and tie them into the mediums but we decided that a better way to go would be to just buy a deep box and move the 5 deep frames to that box with 5 more new deep frames, then put the remaining 10 mediums all in the same box above that. That will give us 1 deep and 1 medium box for the brood area although we keep an open brood nest so the queen can really lay wherever she wants - as she sees fit. 
It was important to put that brood back in the hive on an new frame because what we found was that the hive is honey bound. That means there is so much honey in there that there is very little room for brood. Some of the lower deeps were even completely full of honey. 
Here is the one frame we pulled to replace with the brood comb above tied into a new starter strip frame. As soon as the weather warms up a bit and the bees have a chance to forgive and forget, I'll go back out and pull that box of honey which we moved to the top of the hive. Kirk will probably come back to help me put the new deep box on the bottom once I'm ready and the weather warms up a bit. There are a lot of bees in the hive now and it will be much easier if most of them are in the field when we do the work. 
By the way, you can see that brighter box that I added in the last post about the bees has moved down a spot and has settled in with the rest nicely. It just took it a little time to conform to the others. 
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