Filtered or Unfiltered Beeswax?

Filtered or unfiltered beeswax is the question I get more than any other, and the answer is short. Filtered if it burns or it touches skin. Unfiltered if it’s going on wood, leather or canvas. The rest of this page is why, and the handful of cases where that flips.

What’s in unfiltered wax

Unfiltered means nothing has been taken out since the wax came off the comb. So it still has propolis, pollen, a little honey, bits of old cocoon, and now and then part of a bee.

None of it is contamination. It’s what a hive is made of, and it was all in there while the bees were living in it. People hear “unfiltered” and picture something scraped off a floor. It’s closer to the difference between whole wheat flour and white.

It changes how the wax behaves in three ways that matter. It’s darker, usually a deeper gold running to brown. It smells stronger and sweeter, because pollen and traces of honey are most of what beeswax smells like. And it has solids in it that won’t melt, which is the part that decides which jobs it can do.

Candles want the filtered

Debris doesn’t melt. In a candle it collects in the melt pool around the wick, and once there’s enough of it the wick stops drawing cleanly.

What you see is a candle that tunnels down the middle instead of burning to the edge, or one that gutters and drowns itself, or a flame that keeps flaring and shrinking. People blame the wick, buy a bigger one, and get a candle that smokes. The wick was fine. The wax had grit in it.

For a taper or a pillar, where the wax is the whole candle, it’s worst. A container candle gives you a little more room, but not much.

There’s one exception, and it’s about looks. Some people pour rustic pillars from unfiltered wax on purpose and accept the uneven burn as part of it. If that’s what you want, buy the block. Just know you’re choosing it.

Anything on skin wants the filtered

Wax in a balm or a salve has to melt into oil and stay there. Solids that won’t melt end up as grit in the finished tin, or as a layer you have to strain out at the worst moment in the recipe, when everything is hot and setting.

Lip balm is the least forgiving. It’s a small container, the wax is twenty to twenty five percent of it, and anything gritty goes straight on somebody’s mouth. A salve at ten percent puts up with more, but it’s still not fine.

I use a little of our own wax in the tallow lotion, and it’s the filtered wax, for exactly this reason. There’s more on how that recipe goes together in What’s Actually in the Lotion.

Where unfiltered is the better buy

Furniture polish, waxed canvas, leather dressing, thread wax, cutting board finish, waxing the cut end of a grafted branch, sealing a jar. Anything where the wax gets melted into oil and rubbed into a surface.

In those jobs the solids are invisible and don’t matter. You’re also usually using more wax at once, which is the other half of it. Unfiltered sells in blocks of 25 pounds and up at $8 a pound, against $10 for the filtered.

If you’re making waxed canvas for a run of bags, that’s the buy. Same for anybody making polish in quantity. A woodworker going through fifteen pounds a year is the one person I’d tell to think about it, because they’re close enough to the 25 pound line that going over it saves money on a purchase they were making anyway.

Filtering it yourself

Plenty of people buy the block and filter it at home, which makes sense if you go through enough wax to care about two dollars a pound.

The method isn’t complicated. Melt the wax low in a double boiler, under 185 degrees Fahrenheit so it doesn’t discolour, then pour it through several layers of cheesecloth or an old cotton t-shirt into a clean container. Lift the cloth out rather than squeezing it. Squeezing pushes the fine debris straight through.

Some people run it twice, with a finer cloth the second time. Some pour it into water and let the wax cap set on top while the heavier bits sink. That works, and it leaves you with a wet slab to dry.

Three things to know before you start. It’s slower than it sounds, an hour or more for a few pounds. The cloth isn’t reusable and you’ll get through a lot of it. And the wax you lose in the cloth is real, so a pound of block doesn’t come out as a pound of filtered.

That’s roughly the math behind the two dollars a pound. If your time is worth anything, the gap closes fast. If you enjoy the process, take the block.

Either way, read Melting Beeswax Without Ruining It first, because overheating while filtering is how people turn a good block into a dark one.

The color question

Filtered wax is lighter than unfiltered wax, but neither one is white. If you’ve seen white beeswax, it was bleached.

Color in beeswax comes from what the bees were foraging on and how old the comb was. New comb is nearly white. Comb that has raised brood for a few seasons goes deep brown. Ours runs gold, and it changes through the year, because the forage changes through the year.

Heat changes color too. Wax held above 185 degrees Fahrenheit darkens for good. That figure is from the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium at the University of Delaware. So a dark wax is either old comb or a hot pot, and you can’t tell which by looking.

Nobody should promise you a color. If a supplier’s wax is identical every time, something has been done to it. Bleaching is normal in industrial wax, and it takes the smell out along with the color, and the smell is most of the reason to buy beeswax in the first place.

Which one I’d tell you to buy

If you’re new and not sure, take a pound of filtered. It does every job on this page well enough and the two that matter well, and a pound isn’t a commitment.

If you’re pouring candles or making anything for skin, take filtered and don’t think about it again.

If you go through wax on a workbench, buy the block. You’ll save two dollars a pound and you won’t once wish you’d bought the other one.

If you’re somewhere in the middle, working through five or ten pounds a year on a mix of things, buy filtered. The saving on unfiltered is real, and it isn’t worth having a wax you can’t use for half of what you do.

Both grades, and what they weigh, are on the beeswax page. If you’re still working out the quantity rather than the grade, that’s in How Much Beeswax Do You Need?.