Young worker bees secrete beeswax from eight glands on their abdomens and chew it into comb; beekeepers cut that comb, melt it in water and strain it. Bees make the wax from the honey they eat. They don't collect it from flowers.
How is beeswax made inside the hive?
On the underside of a young worker's abdomen, on segments four through seven, are paired smooth patches called wax mirrors, and a layer of gland tissue sits just behind each one. Malcolm Sanford and Alfred Dietz of the University of Georgia, who studied the gland under the electron microscope, describe the wax building up on each mirror in many thin layers until it forms a scale (Apidologie, 1976). How well developed those glands are depends on the bee's age, how well she's fed and how much wax the colony needs.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's beekeeping bulletin adds the colony's side of it. The wax makers are young bees that have finished feeding the brood. They gorge on honey and hang together in a cluster for about 24 hours while the scales form, then scrape the scales off, chew them with saliva and enzymes into a workable paste, and press them into hexagonal cells. The result is strong for its weight: the bulletin describes a comb as "a 20 g structure which can support 1000 g of honey." Since the bees fuel all this with honey, a colony building comb is spending its stores.
In work published in 1965, a researcher named Morse experimented with skipping the comb altogether. With the queen caged and no foundation, clusters kept under continuous daylight didn't build, and the wax scales that fell below them were collected. The bulletin judged the method suitable for experiments but not economically feasible.
Why beeswax comes in different colors
Fresh comb is white. It darkens with use, because pollen, the silk of cocoons and larval debris get worked into it, and comb that has raised generations of brood ends up nearly black. Once rendered, untreated beeswax ranges through shades of yellow, lighter or deeper depending on how much of that pollen and debris the comb carried. The FAO bulletin is blunt about the rest: "Pure white beeswax on the market has always been bleached."
How beekeepers collect it
In frame-hive beekeeping, wax is a byproduct of the honey harvest. To get honey out of a frame, a beekeeper slices off the thin wax caps the bees have sealed over each cell, and those cappings give the lightest, highest-quality wax. Broken pieces of light comb are the next grade. Old brood comb yields the least wax and the darkest, and scrapings from hive walls are so full of propolis (a resin bees collect from plants) that the FAO advises keeping them out of good wax entirely.
The yield depends on the hive. In modern frame hives, where the beekeeper cuts away little more than the cappings and the tops of the cells, wax comes to only 1–2% of the honey harvest by weight. In top-bar and traditional hives, where whole combs are cut out and crushed, it's 10–15%.
How beeswax is rendered
Rendering means melting the wax out of everything else. The FDA's definition of beeswax sums up the commercial process: the combs are "melted in hot water or steam or with solar heat, and strained," and the wax is then refined by melting again in hot water, sometimes with sulfuric acid or alkali added to pull out impurities (21 CFR 184.1973). The product of that process is what the FDA calls yellow beeswax.
On a smaller scale, the FAO bulletin lays out the steps and the rules:
- Wash honey and loose debris off the comb. Old brood comb may need soaking for up to two days.
- Melt the wax in water, with steam, or in a solar wax melter.
- Strain or press the melted wax away from the solids, and let it set as a cake on top of the water.
- Scrape off the grey layer on the underside of the cake, which is mostly debris, and melt that again if it's worth recovering.
- Leave new blocks to dry for a few weeks. Freshly cleaned wax can hold up to 20% water by weight.
Whatever the method, wax should never be heated above 85°C (185°F) or heated directly without water, because it discolors. And it shouldn't touch iron, copper, brass, zinc or unprotected steel, which darken it. The residue left behind still has uses; the FAO notes it can go into compost or poultry feed.
Unrendered comb is food for wax moths, which can destroy a large amount of it in a short time. Clean wax in solid blocks is safe from them, which is one reason beekeepers render rather than store old comb.
What does "raw" beeswax mean?
"Raw" is a sales word, not a grade. The FDA recognizes two kinds of beeswax, yellow and white, and pharmacopoeias use the same split, calling them cera flava and cera alba (Huanbutta et al., 2026). Any beeswax sold as a block or as pellets has been melted and strained at least once. If "raw" tells you anything, it's that the wax is yellow and unbleached. It can't tell you how well the wax was cleaned.
Good rendered beeswax is yellow and smells sweet. Wax melted in a solar extractor can come out paler and less aromatic, close to the white of paraffin. A grey bottom layer means the wax wasn't fully cleaned. A white dust on an old block or candle, called bloom, is fine wax crystals; it melts back in without harm.
Beeswax is sometimes cut with cheaper paraffin, and the FAO notes that adulteration can only be confirmed by lab testing. Pharmacopoeias give a melting range of 61–66°C (142–151°F), most commonly 62–65°C (144–149°F), but a block that melts in that range isn't proven pure.
From a block of wax to a lip balm
In a lip balm, the rendered wax is melted gently with softer fats and oils, poured into tubes and left to set.
The wax in our own balms comes from nearby beekeepers, a family we've known across four generations, whose hives have worked the area's orchards for close to 90 years (our story). Shea butter and coconut oil go in alongside the wax to soften the stick. Left unflavored, as in the Simply Beeswax 4-pack, the balm keeps a light honey note that comes from the wax. Flavored tubes such as Navel Orange add natural citrus flavor on top of it, and every flavor sits in our lip balm range.
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash.
