How Bees Make Beeswax
Honeybees ingest honey to make beeswax. Did you know it takes approximately 7 kg of honey to produce 1 kg of wax? Once honey is ingested, the bees hang inside the colony for 24 hours while their bodies convert the honey into wax. The wax is secreted out of eight glands on the underside of the bee’s abdomen. When the wax leaves the bee’s body and comes in contact with the air, it causes the wax to solidify into dinner-plate shaped flakes. The bees then grab these wax plates with their legs, bring them up to their mandibles, and chew them to soften the wax. Then they carefully mold the wax into the perfect honeycomb structure. It’s quite the un-bee-lievable process!
What is Beeswax?
Honeybees are the only creatures that make their own home construction materials. When they need to create a place to raise their young or to store food, worker female bees get busy and make honeycomb.
Beeswax is a tough wax formed from a mixture of several compounds including: hydrocarbons, monoesters, diesters, triesters, hydroxy monoesters, hydroxy polyesters, acid esters, acid polyesters, free acids, free alcohols, and other unidentified substances (let’s just call it….wax).
History of Beeswax
When beekeepers used to extract honey, they would use cheesecloth to press the honey out of the beeswax honeycomb. Left with all this extra wax (and time on their hands), they would use their uneventful winter months to create candles out of this versatile material and light up their lives.
Uses for Beeswax
Beeswax isn’t just used to make candles! Buy yourself a big ol’ chunk of the wonderful stuff and use it to:
- Make cosmetics and enhance your inner bee-uty.
- Make soap
- Wax surfboards
- Polish furniture
- Lubricate zippers
- Wax your moustache (and soften the hairs!)
- Become a sculptor and make a work of art