Beeswax Foundation Press RuBee®

01 · HOW THE SHEET COMES OUT

Silicone outside, water inside

Molten wax is poured onto the lower matrix at around 75 °C, the mould is closed, and the water takes the heat out through both faces at once. As soon as it sets, you open it and the sheet lifts out whole.

That circuit is the difference between making foundation and fighting it. An uncooled mould builds up heat: by the third or fourth sheet the silicone is warm, the wax is slow to set and the sheet comes out soft or stuck. With water running, the matrix returns to the same temperature every time — hence the up to 60 sheets an hour.

It is an open circuit, with no pump and no tank: you need a tap near the bench.

02 · TEMPERATURE

The 75 °C is not a quirk of the manual

Beeswax melts between 62 and 65 °C. Pour it barely melted and it starts setting before it has filled the bottom of the cells, so the hexagon comes out blunt. Going the other way is no better: sustained above about 85 °C wax darkens and loses its scent, and the hotter it goes in, the more it shrinks as it cools.

The comfortable window is that 75 °C. If you melt in a water bath the water can reach 100 °C, so let the wax come down before you fill the ladle. And fresh sheets are stacked flat; left hanging, they curl as they finish cooling.

03 · NO CONSUMABLES

Silicone needs no release agent

Plaster moulds and roller mills need a release agent applied on every pass, which runs out and has to be dosed so that none of it stays in the wax. A silicone rubber matrix needs none: the sheet releases on its own.

One less consumable to reorder and one less thing that can end up in the comb. Since the frame is stainless, cleaning comes down to scraping off cold wax.

04 · MOULD OR ROLLERS

How many kilos an hour, and at what price

Sixty Dadant sheets an hour is on the order of 5 to 6 kg of wax. A roller mill multiplies that figure, but it needs a wax ribbon or slab made beforehand; the mould goes from liquid wax to finished sheet in one movement.

For anyone making their own foundation in batches, the mould is plenty: the roller mill starts paying off when wax is counted in hundreds of kilos.

05 · SIZE AND CELL

One mould, one size — and no trimming

The matrix is fixed: you choose the format when you order. We stock two, Langstroth 42 × 20 cm and Dadant 42 × 27 cm, and the sheet comes out already the size of the frame, with nothing to cut.

The cell is standard worker size, 5.4 mm. There is no 4.9 mm small-cell version: if your management depends on that, this is not the machine.

06 · BEFORE YOU BUY

A foundation mould is bought for its format and for the bench it will stand on, not from a catalogue photo.