For the past two months, the Foragers have been doing homework and doing analysis on different types of products made with things that you get from a beehive (honey, wax, etc.) that our club members could make and sell as fundraisers. In Part 1, club members presented different products and recipes and for Part 2, they did analysis on cost to determine what type of ingredients and packaging we should use for our products.
With all the hard decisions made, the Foragers met at the Nimmo United Methodist Church kitchen to make their products. We started with Nina leading the group in making the dog paw/hand balm. This required using a double boiler to melt the beeswax down. If you grate the wax, it makes the melting process go way faster. Lynn and Kayla helped Nina prepare the shea butter and vitamin E. After melting everything down, they poured it into the tins and let it cool. If you are interested in making this balm yourself, please visit the Earth Rated page for the recipe.
The next project the Foragers did was to make lip balm. Club member, Gabby, led the group in this project. Again, it began with the melting of the ingredients using a double boiler. Once everything was melted together, Gabby showed the group how to use the lip balm filling tray to pour the liquid into the containers. Once everything was carefully poured in, they were left to solidify.
The final project was making beeswax wraps which can be used in place of plastic zip bags. This was a tricky recipe because there are several out there, but all different from each other. Almost all recipes call for pine rosin. We decided to switch out the pine rosin for propolis since it’s similar to pine rosin, but it’s another hive product that we could incorporate into it, we could source from our own club members, and we knew that the propolis didn’t contain any harsh or toxic chemicals (yay, natural beekeeping!). The basic recipe for the wraps is to source natural muslin cloth and cut it into sizes you would like for your wraps. To start, we sprinkled shredded beeswax all over the cut fabric and then sprayed our propolis/jojoba oil mixture onto the cloth. The fabric was put into the over at 225 degrees. We took it out occasionally and used a silicon brush to spread the melting wax and oil around. Once it was completely melted and covered, we took it out and let the wax harden. And voila, beeswax wraps.

Beeswax Wraps