Sugaring Season Starts for Sherman Hollow

With this unusual winter weather, lots of sugar makers have already been making syrup.  But due to Florida trips and other interferences, we've put off our season until now.  This weekend Pat and Don cleaned up the vacuum house for sap collection, and converted the Chevy Truck for the sap tank that moves sap from the vacuum house to the sugar house.

Removing the cap to make room for the tank

Prepping the bed for the tail gate

Loading the sap tank onto the tractor

Getting it all lined up

And putting it in place

Checking to make sure it's clean and ready for sap.

We've got Wax!

All those wax caps, that held the honey tight in the honey comb, were melted off, solidifed, then saved in plastic bags.  Finally there was enough collected, that Don decided it was time to purify it so we might be able to make some candles, or lip balm, or maybe some salve.  
The process to clean up the wax was a multi-step process that involved a few trips to the kitchen supply store to get pots and sieves and cheesecloth and more.

The collected wax caps

 

 

 

Don started by melting down the wax caps, in a big kettle.  You can see the caps had lots of bee debris that needed to be cleaned out.

After taking out lots of dead bees and other solids, the wax was allowed to solidify into a large disk

The disk was broken up, put into a double boiled and melted down to get poured through some cheese cloth to take out the final debris.

Some nice clean wax, ready to turn into candles and more.