How Do Bees Make Beeswax?

A bee colony consists of many different types of bees, including a queen bee and many worker bees and drones. The worker bees are the only bees that have special glands that produce wax. Worker bees fly out into the fields and collect the nectar from the flowers they encounter. They carry that nectar back to the hive where it can then be converted into both honey and beeswax.

The bees first make honey by carrying the nectar back to their hive and giving it to the bees that work inside the hive. Those bees have an enzyme inside their bodies that they add to the nectar to cause the water in it to dissipate. Once the water has left the nectar, the converted nectar is placed into storage within the hive, where it ripens into honey.

The worker bees only live for about a month, and their peak wax-making time starts when they are 10 days old and continue until their wax-making glands begin to decline when they are 18 days old. During this time, these bees eat the honey that is produced by the entire population of worker bees, and their special glands convert the honey's natural sugar into beeswax. That wax then comes through tiny pores in the bees' abdomens.

The wax appears as tiny wax flakes that are clear in color. Worker bees can either take the wax from another bee and put it into their mouths, or they can use their back legs to grab the flakes and get their own wax into their mouths. The bees then chew on the wax, making it softer and turning it white. The saliva from the worker bees is what creates this wax transformation, and it enables the wax to be pliable enough to build with. Once beeswax is completed it can be used to repair parts of the comb or to build new sections.