Gerrit and I made beeswax foundation today. Our foundation mill was made by Myron Kropf, an Amish fellow who lives in Arkansas. He specializes in producing and selling nucleus colonies of small cell honey bees.
To make foundation, we melt beeswax in a turkey roaster, then dip a board that has been soaked in water in the melted wax until it gets a wax coating. We peel that off and stack them between sheets of newspaper. We save them until we get enough to make it worthwhile to run them through the 4.9 small cell foundation mill.
The cylinders are wrapped in plastic sheets from plastic bags and this time we used soapy water to help them not stick. We rinsed the foundation sheets in clean water after running them through the mill. It’s quite a bit of work and we never look forward to doing this task, but it helps us be self-sufficient so we don’t have to buy as much commercial foundation. We also use our own recycled wax from our own beehives, so the wax is less likely to be contaminated with pesticides since we do not use any pesticides or other chemicals in our hives. 
