What Is Beeswax?

Beeswax is useful in a variety of applications, from health and beauty products to candles and home items. But what is beeswax exactly and how is it made?

By Petra Ahnert
Updated on September 29, 2023
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by AdobeStock/p-fotography

Beeswax is useful in a variety of applications, from health and beauty products to candles and home items. But what is beeswax exactly and how is it made?

Beeswax is the miracle of the beehive. The comb is built up from nothing and serves as a house, a nursery, and a food pantry. Over the millennia, bees have figured out that by building their combs into hexagons, the combs hold the most amount of honey and require the least amount of wax. The combs also serve as the perfect area for a bee to undergo its metamorphosis from egg to bee.

What Is Beeswax Exactly?

So what is beeswax? In the simplest terms, it is a wax produced by honey bees of the genus Apis. Beeswax consists of at least 284 different compounds, mainly a variety of long-chain alkanes, acids, esters, polyesters, and hydroxy esters, but the exact composition of beeswax varies with location. It has a specific gravity of about 0.95 and a melting point of over 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

More specifically, it is a wax that is secreted from eight wax-producing glands on the worker bee’s abdomen. The wax is secreted in thin sheets called scales. The scales, when first secreted, look a bit like mica flakes. They are clear, colorless, tasteless, and very brittle. Beeswax is typically produced by the younger house bees when they are between twelve and twenty days old. As the bee grows older and begins to collect pollen and nectar, these glands start to atrophy, but their ability to produce beeswax doesn’t disappear completely. When bees swarm they will rapidly produce wax comb, since they need to quickly create a place for the queen to lay eggs and somewhere to store food.

How Is Beeswax Made?

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