07/30/2025
Where does the bees wax come from 🤔
Soon after a newly hatched worker bee emerges as an adult, it begins producing wax. Honey bee workers have pairs of special wax-secreting glands on the undersides of their abdomens. From these glands, they secrete liquified wax, which quickly hardens into thin scales when exposed to the air.
During its peak wax production phase, a healthy worker bee can produce about eight scales of wax in a 12 hour period. To put that into perspective, the colony requires about 1,000 wax scales, to make a single gram of beeswax 😮
After the soft wax hardens, the worker bee uses hairs on her hind legs to scrape the wax from her abdomen. She passes the wax forward to her middle legs, and then to her mandibles. She chews the wax until it is pliable, and carefully shapes it into the hexagonal cells that make up the colony's honeycomb.
During a substantial honeyflow, bees can produce enough wax to draw out entire frames, which will be needed to store their precious nectar 🍯
