Beeswax

Definition

Workers roughly twelve to eighteen days old secrete wax as small flakes from glands on the underside of the abdomen, chew them and build them into comb. It is metabolically expensive — commonly cited at several kilograms of honey consumed per kilogram of wax produced — which is why bees reuse comb wherever they can and why a colony forced to rebuild loses a great deal of ground.

Honey records that discuss this

• Sunflower honeyStraw, beeswax and pollen, with a slightly waxy mouthfeel and a fresh, faintly herbal edge.
• Alfalfa honeyMild, clean and slightly grassy, with a beeswax note and very little else. A background honey, and good at being one.
• Miombo honeyRich and warm with a distinct woody, faintly smoky depth and a caramelised sweetness — the smoke comes partly from the harvest method and partly from the woodland itself.

Guide records that discuss this

• The other hive products: beeswax, propolis, royal jelly and bee pollenFour substances a colony makes or collects besides honey, each with a real biological function and a marketing story that runs well ahead of it. Here is what each one actually is.
• Honeycomb: what it is, and how to eat itComb honey is honey as it left the bees, still in the wax they built to hold it. You can eat the wax, it will not harm you, and there is a reasonable argument that it is the most honest product in the category.
• Honey in ancient RomeRome treated beekeeping as a branch of estate agriculture and wrote about it accordingly: siting, materials, yields and returns. It also produced the fullest surviving account of the strangest thing anybody believed about bees.
• Honey traditions around the worldHoney turns up in ritual, medicine, marriage and law on every inhabited continent, and the patterns repeat in ways that are hard to explain by contact alone.
• Honey and bee symbolismBees have stood for industry, chastity, monarchy, resurrection, the soul and the perfect state — often simultaneously, and often on the strength of biology that turned out to be wrong.
• Beeswax: what it is and how bees make itA wax secreted from a bee's own abdomen at enormous metabolic cost, and for most of European history the more valuable half of the hive.
• The earliest evidence of honeyThere is no date for the first honey and there is unlikely ever to be one. There are six separate earliest-known findings, established by different methods and separated by thousands of years, and almost every confident sentence on this subject is two of them run together.
• Beeswax in Neolithic potteryThe largest single body of evidence for early human use of honey bees is chemical rather than pictorial: a wax signature trapped in the fabric of cooking pots, recovered from thousands of sherds across three continents.
• The oldest honey claims, examinedHoney attracts confident numbers. Most of them are one finding promoted into another, a translation problem, or a story with no primary source anybody has produced. Here are the ones in widest circulation and what is actually behind each.