# Melting the fragrance out of beeswax



## Beemom

Greetings All,
I just watched a video interview with a fellow from Yankee Candle Company. He warned against using candle warmers because as the wax is warmed, the scent is released from the melted wax. When the wax cools and solidifies, it is essentially unscented. On the other hand, (lit) candles burn off the melted wax, thus, when the candle is relit there is always scent (previously unmelted wax) to throw scent into air. My question is, can the beeswax honey fragrance ever be melted off during the rendering process at a high enough temperature over enough time? When cleaning my wax, I first put it through a water bath to warm at 190 degrees, strain water/wax through a 600-400 micron filter into a bucket to cool. Then I drain water, scrap off the slumgum, and reheat wax in a small amount of water at 160 degrees for 2-3 days to allow fine debris to settle. I pour off wax from the top spigot of my wax separator, and strain through a grease filter if needed. My wax is clean, but I think it's at the expense of the lovely fragrance. It could be my imagination, though. I sniff so much beeswax, I can hardly detect frangrance from unprocessed wax. Am I overdoing the cleaning? Is it possible to lose the frangrance? Thanks much!
P.S. My two 12 year-old sons and I attended a bee keeping class last Saturday. We were so inspired that we joined the San Mateo County Beekeepers Guild and signed up to purchase 3 hives. My sons are beesily buzzing away building our top bar hives


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## sqkcrk

I have no reason to believe that the natural aroma of beeswax can be removed from the wax. I have been around wax rendering plants. They run steam thru the vats to render comb and slum gum and that it pretty hot. There is plenty of the original odor left. I'm pretty sure that the guy is refering to artificially added fragrances.


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## JohnK and Sheri

I am not sure if beeswax scent can be destroyed by heating, I would doubt it. Yankee candle is using scented oils and they will disperse and evaporate when heated. That is why you always add the scent right before pouring, to give the least amount of time for the scent to disperse.
Beeswax has it's own integral fragrance, I have never found melting to diminish the smell, at least not the way we handle it. However, it may not be necessary for you to heat it for such a long time. 160 for three days? That seems excessive to me, not to mention expensive, energywise. 
We routinely melt the water-bath-cleaned wax for it's final filter without water and have found debris generally settles out quickly, in a couple hours or less, at about 180 and what doesn't settle gets taken out by the filter. We do tilt the melter back and pour slowly so what settles doesn't get swept out the nozzle during the pour. All the wax goes through a double grease filter, into the pour pots, then into molds. 
Every dozen or so cycles we clean the settled debris from the melter.
Sheri


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## HONEYDEW

Yes the wax will loose its beeswax smell after some time, I kept my melter running through the holidays (yes expensive) at about 160 deg. and the last 30lbs stayed at that temp for over 2 weeks ..forgot it was on :doh: and it now smells like paraffin sorta. So it is now going to be "scented" beeswax candles


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## Ben Brewcat

Anytime you smell something, it's because some of the fragrance has left the source material. Open up a solar melter and you'll see what we mean . However, I've run wax through the solar, then re-rendered for filtering, then made candles and they still have fragrance. Heck, I have blocks of wax laying around that have to have been melted a good few times and they still have the "stuff".

Sounds like marketing hooey. Unless you do a two-week bake in a melter , most any reasonably-treated wax should have fragrance intact.


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