Important: Safety Warning
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
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Home › Candies and Candy Making › Candies and Candy Making: Beeswax
Candies and Candy Making: Beeswax
To Refine Beeswax. - Add about 5 per cent water to crude beeswax and melt with gentle heat. Raise to a boil, let boil for a few minutes, and add about 1 per cent concentrated nitric acid. Use for this purpose an earthenware vessel set in boiling water, and continue to boil until the fumes of the acid cease to be evolved.
Or when the melted wax has boiled for a few minutes scatter 5 or 6 per cent of sulphuric acid over the surface of the melted wax. It must be done with care. If the vessel is not sufficiently deep the wax will froth up and run over the sides. After adding the acid cover the mixture, remove it from the fire, and before it is quite cool skim it off with a heated ladle. Take care not to disturb the sediment. Scrape the impurities from the inside of the cake. Remelt and strain through cheese cloth. The addition of a little annotto will improve the color of the wax. To Whiten Beeswax. -Melt up the wax with gentle heat and dip into it thin hard-wood boards, plates, or any suitable flat articles previously dipped in water to prevent the wax sticking. When these are removed they will be covered with a thin plate of wax. Loosen this film of wax with a knife and strip it off. Spread these thin sheets upon a white cloth upon the grass and expose them to the sun and air to bleach. Afterwards remelt and form into cakes. Or melt the wax with hot water and squeeze through a fine linen cloth. Pour in shallow molds and when hard expose to the air, sprinkling frequently with water and turning from time to time until quite white.
To Color Beeswax. -To color beeswax, add bright palm oil. Or as a sufficient quantity of palm oil to color adulterates the wax, color with annotto in the proportion of about 4 ounces to 100 pounds of wax, according to the color required. Shave the annotto in 3 to 4 quarts of soft wawax, let boil until the water is evaporated and the wax is of a deeporange color. Melt the remainder of the wax, and stir in the colored wax until the proper shade is produced.
Test from time to time by cooling a little on a glass plate.
Bottle Wax. - To make wax for sealing corked bottles and similar purposes, melt together 6 ounces of black rosin, ounce of beeswax, and 1½ ounces of fine ivory black.
Or for red wax, substitute 1½ ounces of Venetian red or red lead for the ivory black.
Or mix 1 pound of beeswax, 1 pound of rosin, pound of tallow.
Color with red or yellow ocher or other coloring matter. Melt and stir together.