Bees Wax

The other day I decided to mind my own bees wax.
This summer, the day I was stung, I had been harvesting the crooked combs in hive #1. I was on a mission to encourage the bees to build on my newly designed bar and therefore have straight comb.
Because that day ended in the hospital I hadn't really thought about the few combs of wax sitting in a pot in the corner of the out building.
But when I was tidying up the other day I decided to process it.
To my surprise there was a wax moth on the top comb.

I had only read about these and had never seen one.
Yuck.
I decided to boil the whole business and see what I got.

My bee friend has a great post about how to process bees wax so I won't try to do better than her. I will just show you a little of my process and if you are interested in doing it yourself check out Holly's post.
I was really surprised at how much pollen had been in the combs and felt a little sad about ruining something that took so many bees a lifetime to gather, but there was no going back now.
As I filtered out the stuff, surprise...

One very nasty boiled grub.
Most of all I was surprised at the bright yellow of the wax, tinted by all that pollen.
Not a lot of wax from all those combs, but plenty to make lip balm for Christmas presents.

More on Grease Patties and Hunkerin' Down for Winter

If you look close you can see a passageway into the feeder through the grease pattie.

Buck and I did give the grease patties one more try for the Fall hoping to head off any spurt in the mite population. I don't know if it worked. Spring will tell.
The funny thing is that we tried to trick the bees into walking on the grease patties by building a globby hoop for them to have walk through to get to the syrup in the syrup feeder.
After my last try with grease patties I was expecting the bees to avoid the grease patties. But when we started putting it into the hive the bees seemed to be really happy to see it. They happily began licking on it.
But the next week we opened the hives to check the syrup level and were surprised to find that hardly any syrup was gone and the bees had once again stacked dead bees and debris onto the grease patties.
We decided to just clean the grease patties out and leave the bees to their syrup.

One week later, covered in dead bees but looking like it had been eaten on.

Then I was at the hay house a week later and I noticed that when I open the door a couple of bees flew in and started trying to pry open the half empty bag of grease patties I had set on the feed barrel.
They are giving me very mixed signals. Do they only like it fresh? Do only a few bees like it and the rest hate it and stack dead things on it? Do they only like grease pattie on Sundays and all the rest of the week it is sinful?
It's a mystery.
We will put straw in the hive attics and their bottom boards on this week to keep them warm for the winter but let the hive breath too. It has been colder this month than in the past. It's so cold out  I  have a hankerin' for some grease pattie. MMMM grease and sugar.