Q&A for How to Melt Beeswax

There shouldn't be any "too hard" for beeswax. You could even freeze it, but it may become brittle while it is frozen. If it gets hard, then you can melt/soften it with a hairdryer or heat gun.

Shake the container that has the wax in it. If there are no lumps and the wax is close to the consistency of water, you're good to go.

This depends on how much wax is cooling. Leaving it in the fridge for a few hours, or even overnight, will speed up the process though.

Put it into a microwave, heating for 20 seconds at a time. Check and stir every 20 seconds, repeating as needed to get it to the right consistency.

Yes, you can reheat your salve to add in more beeswax. You can also reheat to add more oil if your salve is too hard.

Yes, it can, as long as there is a thermostat to maintain the temperature around the 66º to 70º mark.

Use an old frying pan, as it will be hard to clean after you melt beeswax in it. Set thermostat to 64 degrees Celcius, put wax in the pan, keep lid handy in case of fire, and the wax will melt and any impurities will sink to the bottom. Pour off liquid wax into moulds (silicone muffin pans are good for this).

Beeswax shrinks as it cools, so it will either shrink away from the walls of the mold or shrink away from the wick in the middle. Cracking suggests it is shrinking away from the wick. The hotter the wax is when poured and the faster it cools, the bigger the cracks will be. To reduce the cracking, maintain the wax temperature just above the melting point (66ºC - 70ºC) and let the candle cool slowly.

If you heat the wax to a high temperature, then over time you will burn the wax. It will change from the golden color to a gold color with a greenish tinge. Once it changes color, the relative glossiness becomes a moot point.

Boil some water and then add the wax. Use an old pot unless you want to eat wax with all of your food for the next week. Be careful because it MAY burst into flames (I've never had it happen and I've melted a lot of wax). Just use caution, and if you have any doubt just turn the heat down a little. Also, be careful of splashes because they can burn and wax spots are a pain to get off of the stove/walls/counter.

You should be able to use any sort of regular candle wick. I've even used rolled up toilet paper (not the best idea, but it works sometimes) and plain cotton string. It'll depend on the size of the candle you're making, though. Any 100% cotton string/wick will work, but you'll need to match the string sizes to the candle you're making.

Yes, you can chop the beeswax sheets into smaller pieces and melt them like that.

You can add fragrance after the wax is all melted. Just stir it in and remove it from the heat source.

Beeswax expands when heated and contracts as it cools, just like water does when it's frozen.

Put some skewers on the bottom of a pot large enough to hold the jar, add some water, as much as possible without the jar starting to float, put the jar into the water, bring to a boil, then let it simmer as weakly as possibly until all wax is melted. The skewers prevent the jar touching the bottom of the pot, where the metal may reach higher temperatures than desired for wax melting. Anything will do, skewers are just usually available, in a kitchen. Saved ice cream popsicle sticks or any mother non-metallic, non-plastic thing will do too.