How to refine Bee's Wax; from sticky mess to clean and usable

I'm really into bees wax at the moment. It smells beautiful. It feels so interesting. I can't stop touching it. If you have a chew on the unrefined honeycomb it tastes like honey. Mmmm. It's one of natures miracle products.

My friends at Ecoburbia have hives and after they do a honey harvest they have bucket loads of honeycomb wax left over. Another friend learnt how to refine it and she had been giving me her wax to make lip balm and hand cream. You hardly need any bees wax for these recipes, but then I learned how to make sandwich wraps with bees wax (which will be the subject of my next post), for which you need a fair chunk of refined wax. So I decided I needed to learn how to refine it myself. And I'm so glad I did. Turning a sticky, dirty, mess (bees apparently do not wipe their feet when they go home to their hive) into something amazing and useful is such fun! So here's how to do it.

First you need some gear from the op-shop. You wont be able to use your wax refining pots for food again, it gets too messy. You need a big stock pot, a smaller pot and a bowl to fit in the small pot for double boiling, a sieve, some fabric and some silicone moulds (actually I use these for cooking too). 

Take your bucket of sticky honeycomb, complete with dirt, honey, dead bees, sticks and whatever else you find and plonk it all in a big stock pot filled with water. 

Stir it and bring it to a hard boil for about 10 minutes or so. This dissolves all the honey and loosens the other debris from the wax. 

Let it cool in the pot. I usually leave it over night. The wax floats to the top and the honey and much of the dirt is left in the water. When the wax cools and sets you end up with a disk of wax with all the remaining grainy debris on one side of it, sadly this often includes the bees too. Take out the disk and just pour the water away. 

Then you simply cut off the grainy edge with a sharp knife, break up the cleaner bits and then double boil it to melt it again.

Once its all nicely melted in the bowl, pour it into the silicone moulds through a sieve lined with muslin or cheesecloth to catch the very fine bits of debris in the wax. I haven't found a way to clean the cloth and use again but somehow we always seem to have some kind of fabric around the house to use.

Let it cool for a 10 minutes or so then pop them out of the mould. And that's it. Beautiful, clean refined bees wax ready for further uses. And yes, I'll be sharing some of those other uses soon.

Home made hand cream for a beautiful midwife

My sister is a beautiful soul and has been a role model for me throughout my life. She was with me when Quincey was born and was such a source of strength and comfort for me - then and at when ever I've needed her. I don't know what I would have done without her at times. Now though, its my turn to help her as she is returning to work after several years off with her own young kids. My sister is a midwife and to be sure, the best sort of midwife you could hope for - calm, non-judgmental, reassuring, honest and skilled.

She is also very good on general hygiene, ie washing her hands at work and has really dry skin now, so I made her some home made hand cream. My friend made some for me recently and I just love it! Its Creme Galen Cold Cream and according to the recipe was created by the Roman doctor Aurelius Galenus (AD 129 - 217).

5 oz rose water
1 oz unbleached beeswax
6 oz extra virgin olive oil
8 drops rose essential oil

Grate the bees wax. Gently heat the rose water in a glass bowl in a hot water bath. In a separate bowl combine the beeswax and oil and then gently heat until liquid. Remove both bowls from heat and slowly pour the rose water into the oil and wax blend. Mix with a stick blender until combined. Add the essential oil and stir. Before the liquid cools and sets, pour into clean small jars or tins.

It was particularly satisfying making this because I used bees wax from a friends backyard hive and olive oil from our last Great Hilton Harvest Olive Pressing. Okay, the rose water was from Syria and I'm not sure about the rose oil.

I use the cream at night as it is quite heavy and makes my skin shiny. In the morning I just slash my face with water and away I go. I use it on my hands, legs and face. I don't understand why people need a hand cream, a face cream and a body cream. Last time I checked my face and hands were a part of my body!

A cure for dandruff

I've had dandruff for pretty much all of my adult life. It totally sux. I rarely wear black clothes because of flakes on my shoulders and I hate people touching my hair - a scalp massage is out of the question. I've generally tried to control it by going thorough phases of different treatments. I usually have about seven types of shampoo in the shower ranging from organic hippy stuff to hard core chemical stuff. All of these purchased remedies would work for a few weeks to a few months then gradually become less and less effective, so I'd start the rotation again through my selection of useless, expensive, highly packaged shampoos. Grrr. 

Then a beautiful hippy friend suggested doing nothing. So I tried a phase of no shampoo but using a random selection of oils (essential oils in carrier oils). And I hit on a cure...but unfortunately I didn't write it down and could not work out from the smell what the heck I put in it! Grrr again! 

So, I did some dedicated research on dandruff which took all of a couple of hours online and in my op shop aromatherapy books. 

I found that dandruff is kind of a mystery and there are lots of causes, but the most common theory is that it is fungal. Gross. Anyway, it was a good starting point. I researched base oils and found that coconut oil is anti-fungal. Good. Then I researched my essential oil collection and found that several were anti-fungal: patchouli, tea tree, sandalwood and orange.

I mixed up a potion and volia! A cure! My secret recipe (that I meticulously recorded) is:

20 drops patchouli

5 drops sandalwood

in 60 ml coconut oil

I just put a dob of it in my palm and let it melt (if its solid) then massage it into my scalp a few hours before I have a shower and then rise it out. I'm a little nervous to use shampoo again so, so far I've not bothered with that. But with short hair I can get away with it.

The results have been pretty amazing, and its been a couple of months. My dandruff is not 100% clear but it is now only a few flakes here and there not a total, permanent snow storm! And now I have a medical excuse for getting around smelling like a hippy. Perfect.

Luscious honey lip balm

Lip balm is a fabulous quick and easy gift. I tried it because I wanted to make some to sell at our Hilton Harvest Twilight Fair and because my friend gave me some beeswax and honey from his hive...so I had to find something to do with it. Its so special to use local, natural, unprocessed ingredients.

It honestly took me about 20 mins to make seven cute little pots of natural lip balm. basically all you do is melt bees wax and a carrier oil and add essential oil or honey if you fancy it.

This is what you need:

The recipe I used is from Martha Stewart but I increased the volumes:
4.5 tablespoons grated beeswax
7.5 tablespoons jojoba oil
1.5 teaspoons honey

1. Grate the beeswax (or purchase pelletised bees wax)
2. Melt the beeswax and oil in a double boiler (a small pot in a larger pot with boiling water)
3. Remove from heat and stir in honey thoroughly
4. Pour into little pots or jars

Easy. Well in truth I didn't stir in the honey well enough so there is a layer of darker honey at the very bottom of the pots, but that's no big drama! Whack on a cute label and hey presto, a boutique batch of 100% natural, local kissing potion!

I think this kind of stuff is important - its cutesey wootsie AND important for two reasons. Firstly it means that you can pretty much totally avoid the smelly isles of the supermarket (we only purchase loo roll, panadol and kids toothpaste down that isle). So you save money, save packaging and save 'cosmetics miles'. You realise it is not Maybelline or similar. No maybes about it. Secondly, I don't mean to sound alarmist but...COSMETICS AND STUFF CAN GIVE YOU CANCER! Well maybe anyway. I don't want to risk it. Check out this very interesting short doco by the makers of the fantastic and life changing Story of Stuff. It's the Story of Cosmetics.

DIY deodorant

Since getting into plastic free living (in varying bouts of enthusiasm) I've found myself getting into aromatherapies. There is a whole world of info about aromatherapies and how to and not to use them. Its super interesting and I've had some amazing success. The most dramatic of which was putting a drop of tea tree oil on Quin's massive wart morning and night for three days then watching it gradually disappear over the next couple of weeks. I wish I had taken a before and after shot!

I've been making my own home made deodorant for a year or so now and I can testify that I do not smell bad. I smell like rose geranium and oranges. Very girly actually. And I'm not one of those lucky people who can get away without deodorant. I really can tell if I forget to use it! But this DIY product is as good as any I've purchased, and much more effective than other hippy solutions like the mineral crystals you wet and rub on your armpits. It does leave a slightly powdery residual on your arm pits and it might not be what you use when you wear your little back dress to the casino...but that's not really an issue for me. Its fine to use with singlets.

This, along with 15 minutes or so is all you need.

So here is the recipe:

1. Take equal parts of bi carb and cornflour - say 1/4 cup each
2. Add a tablespoon or two of coconut oil (you may need to microwave it to turn it to liquid - coconut oil melts at about 24 degrees)
3. Add your essential oils - I add about 10 drops each of two kinds of oils
4. Mix well
5. Pack in to a silicone mould and refrigerate

And this is the finished product. Just keep it in the fridge in a little bowl during summer because if its just left on the shelf when its warm it will be too soft to use due to the melting point of the coconut oil. Just rub it on your armpits and off you go!

I love being able to make gifts for people. It was my brother-in-laws birthday yesterday and he is a very blokey bloke -the blue singlet, camping, export beer drinking type. Lovable though, with many redeeming characters, not least of all, the good sense to marry my sister. Anyway  I made him his own deodorant with very masculine essential oils. He liked it and said he would test it out with one armpit using my deodorant and the other armpit with commercial crap. I look forward to the results.

DIY Toothpaste

At work we are in the throws of preparing for the Plastic Free July Challenge - can you go for one shopping trip, a week or a month without using single use disposable plastic? It was an idea a friend had and we ran with it last year and had about 40 households participate, this year we have over 100 already! It will probably go viral and end up like Earth Hour. That is our humble prediction. In preparation for Plastic Free July I am doing a little demo on how to make toothpaste and so had to do my homework...but I got a little help...

Quin was super enthusiastic about the idea. The recipe is simple (and there are other plastic free recipe's on the Earth Carers website):

1/3 cup bi carb

enough coconut oil to make a paste

pinch salt

peppermint essential oil or similar to taste

So we started out and mixed together the ingredients and it was all fun...

 

Now time to actually try it out. Initial excitement turned to...well...

... bitter disappointment. It looked like toothpaste, it smelled like toothpaste, it was almost the same consistency as toothpaste but the taste? I think his face says it all.  

 

Oh well. He will still take it for news at school next week and said that during July he will try half normal and half homemade toothpaste and I said that was a fine contribution to Plastic Free July in our household.