How Do Honey Bees Make Beeswax?
A honey bee's comb is made of beeswax. But have you ever wondered how bees make it?
Worker bees change jobs as they grow older. During the first day or two of their adult lives, they clean the comb and the hive. By about the third day, they begin producing royal jelly and caring for the developing larvae.
Then, at around 12–18 days of age, young worker bees enter their wax-producing stage. They consume large amounts of honey—about their own body weight—and convert the sugars in the honey into beeswax inside their bodies.
The wax is secreted through eight wax glands on the underside of the abdomen as tiny, white, scale-like flakes. The bees pick up these wax scales with their hind legs, pass them to their mouths, chew them until they become soft and pliable, and use them to build the familiar hexagonal honeycomb cells or repair damaged comb.
In other words, beeswax is a building material that worker bees make from honey.
Producing beeswax is surprisingly expensive. It is estimated that it takes about 6–8 grams of honey to produce just 1 gram of beeswax.
For a honey bee colony, building comb is a major investment. That is why bees carefully maintain and reuse their comb for as long as possible, rather than rebuilding it from scratch each year.
Once you realize how much honey is required to make beeswax, it's easy to understand why bees treat every comb with such extraordinary care.