Eight Acres

 In Australia, bee boxes are usually made from hoop pine, which is an inexpensive soft wood. The only problem is that it is prone to wood rot in hot humid conditions. The result is that boxes that are not treated with fungicide may only last a few years before they fall apart. Most commercial beekeepers dip their hives in fungicide - either copper napthalate or copper-chrome-arsenate (CCA) to prevent wood rot. Another common technique is dipping the hives in hot paraffin wax to seal the wood. As our main objective in beekeeping (and growing our own food generally) is to avoid exposure to toxic chemicals, the last thing I want to do is put copper napthalate or CCA in bee hives when there is a good chance that these chemicals will end up in the honey and beeswax that I want to harvest. Additionally, these are both pesticides, and can't be good for the health of the bees either. Paraffin wax is better, but still a product derived from petroleum and hardly natural.  When we made...

 Since I have been keeping bees and selling our beeswax I have been getting questions about making beeswax wraps. Many people are buying beeswax to make beeswax wraps, and wanted to know more about it. I owned a few beeswax wraps, but I had never made them myself! It has been on my list of things to try for a while now, and over the Christmas break I finally had time to make some beeswax wraps, so now I can tell you all about it .    What are beeswax wraps? A beeswax wrap is a piece of cotton fabric infused with beeswax (usually also with gum rosin for stickiness and jojoba oil to make it flexible). Beeswax wraps can be used instead of plastic wrap/glad wrap/cling wrap or aluminium foil to keep food fresh both in the fridge and in the pantry. You can wrap individual food items in the beeswax wrap or use the wrap to seal a container. If you want to reduce the amount of rubbish , particularly plastic rubbish, that you produce, then beeswax wraps are a great place to s...