Beeswax: what it is and how bees make it

Bees make it; they do not gather it

Worker honey bees between roughly twelve and eighteen days old have functioning wax glands on the underside of the abdomen. They secrete wax as small clear scales, chew them with mandibular secretions until pliable, and build. The bees hang in chains — festooning — while they do it, and the cluster is held near 35 °C because wax will not work cold.

It is metabolically expensive. Estimates run from about six to eight kilograms of honey consumed per kilogram of wax produced, which is why bees reuse comb where they can and why giving a colony drawn comb rather than foundation measurably increases its honey surplus.

The hexagon question

Honeycomb cells are hexagonal because a hexagon tiles a plane with the least wall material for the area enclosed — a genuine optimum, proved mathematically only in 1999. Whether bees build hexagons directly or build circles that settle into hexagons under surface tension and warmth has been argued for a century and is still not fully settled.

Why wax was once worth more than honey

Medieval European beekeeping was substantially a wax industry. Church liturgy required candles of pure beeswax rather than tallow, monastic and manorial accounts frequently record wax as the rendered product and honey as the by-product, and rents were sometimes payable in wax. The honey went into mead, which was itself partly a way of using a surplus that would otherwise ferment.

• Candles — the demand that drove the medieval trade.
• Lost-wax casting, in use for bronze work since antiquity.
• Waterproofing, sealing and writing tablets.
• Cosmetics, polish and food coating, which is most of the modern market.

What it is chemically

A complex mixture of several hundred compounds — mostly esters of long-chain fatty acids and alcohols, with hydrocarbons and free acids. It melts around 62 to 65 °C, which is high enough to hold shape in a hive at 35 °C and low enough to work by hand once warmed.