Cleaning Beeswax…again!!

Join us as ENSC founder Tommy Crooks shares anecdotes from his long and winding road building the company from kitchen table experiments to today's global natural skincare brand.

One day I got a call from a beekeeper in Kincardineshire to tell me he had a lot of beeswax and was I interested? Ten minutes later in was in my van on a two-and-a-half-hour drive, to the northeast coast of Scotland, excited at the thought of new supplies, and potentially, a reliable supplier for future needs. 

Driving from Edinburgh to Johnshaven, on the northeast coast is beautiful when the weather is nice, and that day, although cold, the winter sun was blazing in the sky.

When I arrived, I was greeted by a cheery beekeeper and his two quiet assistants who showed me over to a shed containing bags of black powdery stuff that looked nothing like the golden wax I’d been expecting. “What’s that?”, I asked, puzzled. “Oh, that’s the wax, it just needs cleaned”.

It didn’t look promising but as I’d driven the distance, I allowed myself to be convinced that after careful cleaning, I’d have around 40kg of wax, which was a huge amount, so I paid him a hefty sum of cash, loaded up my van and drove home.

The next day, I started the cleaning process which involved melting the evil looking black “Stuff”, as I’ll call it in my special German wax melter, and carefully sifting off the stuff that rose to the top.

The first thing to go wrong was I’d set the temperature on the melter too high, causing the lid to fly off, and then the melter overflowed with a boiling nasty black liquid splashing all over the table, the floor, and generally caused a chaotic mess all over the place. Three weeks later I’d managed to salvage 6kg of wax, and not the 40kg I’d expected. To be fair to the beekeeper, he paid me back the majority of the money I’d paid him around one year later.