Before I became a beekeeper, I had never done anything with beeswax, or even owned a beeswax candle. But since I started keeping bees, I have learned that beeswax is pretty amazing. Around 2-3 weeks of age, worker bees develop 4 pairs of wax producing glands on the underside of their abdomens. These glands secrete beeswax in liquid form that quickly solidifies into scales once it contacts the air. (Here is a link to a site with a nice picture of a bee making wax.) The bees then chew on the scales, to soften the wax, and form it into the hexagonal honeycomb that we all recognize. Some of that wax is collected as a “byproduct” of honey harvesting, and for centuries, industrious humans have been figuring out ways to put it to work.
Although beeswax is white when it is first secreted, propolis and pollen stain it, so that by the time a beekeeper harvests it, it is a beautiful, bright yellow color, with an amazing fragrance that is unique to natural beeswax. Once you see it and smell it, you want to keep it and make things with it. I use my wax to make candles (occasionally). I love the smell of a burning beeswax candle and can not imagine adding any other fragrance. I also make paw balm and cutting board conditioner that I sell at market, and soap for our use at home only, so far. I hope to use it to wax cheeses, once I have enough goat milk to start making cheese again. Plus, I have ideas about many more things I could make with it, when I have time and enough wax.
One of the biggest challenges of beeswax, for a small apiary like mine, is collecting enough of it. When making beeswax products, I use only the wax from the cappings I cut off during my honey harvests, and fresh burr comb (the comb bees build in the spaces in the hives we don’t want them to build in). Those provide the cleanest, yellowest, and best smelling wax. But the ratio of wax to honey is pretty slim. After harvesting 450 lbs of honey, I have collected just over 6 lbs of cappings wax. And once I finish cleaning it, there will be less. As you might imagine, six pounds doesn’t make many candles.
The other challenge with beeswax is that getting it clean enough to use in skin products and candles is actually a LOT of work for a small producer like me. I don’t have fancy wax heating and filtering equipment. Sometimes, during the cleaning process, I wonder if it is worth it. But once it is clean and I have a slab of beautiful, golden, fragrant wax, it feels like it is. And it is fun to think about what I can make with my very own “homemade” wax. So I just stay off the internet, where I see that I can buy yellow beeswax for what seems like a crazy low price of $12/lb (maybe less if I looked some more!). Like maple syrup, my response is that sellers are not charging anywhere near enough for their product!!! But I bet the $12/lb stuff doesn’t smell anywhere near as good as mine!!!
I do also use my solar wax melter to collect wax from old comb. Old comb is very dark brown, sometimes almost black, so it is fun to watch the heat of the sun milk bright yellow wax out of them. However, there is surprisingly little wax to be reclaimed from old comb. This is because over time much of the structure of the comb is replaced by silk from cocoons of repeated generations of metamorphizing bees, and relatively little wax remains .
the sun.
Despite the sun’s ability to pull pretty yellow wax out of dirty old comb, I do not use that wax for making my wax products. That is because the old comb wax likely contains years of pesticide residue, collected over time by foraging bees (outside of my property where they are not used). I do not feel comfortable having anyone burning it in candles, or putting it on their skin or on something they will be using to prepare food. So here at the farm, that wax is set aside for construction uses like wax bars for waxing drawer slides, waxing screws, etc. Overall, I don’t have lots of uses for it. However, I hate to see something that the bees made so painstakingly go to waste, so if you can think of something you could use it for, let me know, and we can work out a deal!
