Most people have heard of a method to clean up oil from water using bushels of hay, but this is the first I have seen of using wax. Willy Nelson, who apparently has no relation to the weed smoking singer, demonstrates a method of cleaning water using granulated wax. He shows this method in two different examples in an interview several years ago. Nelson was so confident in the procedure that he actually drinks the water he removes the oil from.  Here is the clip:

While this video was cool to watch and the method was amazing, I can not even imagine how much wax it would take to clean the Gulf of Mexico. This may be useable on some kind of small scale, but unless we get an army of a trillion bees I think we may be out of luck.