BEESWAX PRODUCTION

Bees produce beeswax by synthesizing the sugars in honey.  The worker bee’s wax glands mature  around her second week of  life as  an adult and are situated on her lower
abdomen. The wax appears as  a clear liquid,  cools and turns white,  forming a small wax scale or flake.  The workers can produce this  in very large quantities. 

In the hive,  they often link together into chains and clusters between the combs,  which helps them to  maintain a temperature of  about 35° C (96° F)  in order to  produce wax. After clustering for around 24 hours,  the small wax scales are secreted.

Uses
Wax is the bees’  basic house-building unit.  It is often mixed with some propolis for strength and,  without it,  a colony could not exist.  It  takes over 7 kg (15 lb) of  honey to  produce 1 kg (2 lb) of  wax,  and so you can see that,  if  you take away  the beeswax at  harvest time for sale as  comb  honey,  the bees will need to  use up a large amount of  honey to  replace it. 

It  becomes a matter of  working out what  will make the most money for the beekeeper – selling honey alone and preserving  the wax for a good harvest the next year or a second harvest in year one,  or selling more  expensive comb honey and letting the bees use up valuable honey in replacing it. 

It  is estimated that  a standard Langstroth frame of  comb can hold up to  3.8 kg (8¼ lb) of  honey.  The wax necessary to  hold this weighs only 100 g (3½ oz).  Each  wax scale produced by a honeybee weighs about 1 mg, which means that  nearly  one million are needed to  make 1 kg (2 lb) of  wax,  and approximately 9 x 105 of  these little scales are needed to  make sufficient wax for a normal bee colony.  Work  it out!

Composition
The  composition  of  beeswax  is  complex,  but  it  contains  hydrocarbons,  straight-chain monohydric alcohols,  acids,  hydroxy acids,  oils and other substances.  Its specific gravity is less  than one,  so it floats on water.  It  melts  at  63–65° C (145–149º  F)  and solidifies at 60–63° C (140–145º  F),  depending on its purity.

Wax is normally a by-product for beekeepers and,  as  a guide,  for each  60 kg (130 lb) of  honey extracted from the hive,  about 1  kg  (2 lb) of  beeswax is produced.  This comes from the cappings of  the honeycomb,  which are removed during the honey-extraction process.