Most of us have purchased honey in one-pound plastic squeeze bottles from local beekeepers or farmers’ markets. Perhaps you did not know that there is a secondary and more valuable product collected during honey extraction, beeswax! Beekeepers take care to extract all the honey they can without destroying the comb that their bees need to rear new bees and to store nectar, pollen, and honey. Harvesting both honey and wax is a delicate balancing act for the beekeeper.
Beekeepers harvest wax from the bees in two basic ways. The first is as a result of the first step of honey extraction, “uncapping.” In the picture you see a beekeeping friend in our garage using a hot knife to slice open the light-colored wax caps on cells of honey. “Cappings wax” is the purist and most valuable honeybee wax; a one-hundred-pound honnot ey harvest yields about one pound of cappings wax. Commercial beekeepers mechanize the honey extraction process and yield huge volumes of honey and cappings wax, but the process is the same as for backyard beekeepers.
Beekeepers also collect wax in a covered bucket as they work a colony of bees. He or she will scrape away any beeswax that is not in the correct position on the frames and then store it in the freezer. Honeybees prefer order inside their hives. If the frames are too far apart, then bees build comb in the spaces between frames and on the tops and bottoms of frames. Local beekeepers called this “burr comb,” and many scrape it off and collect the wax. Burr comb can really make a mess and is a waste of the bees’ resources.
