Beeswax, collecting, cleaning and using it.

This article about beeswax was written for use in Beds BKA Yearbook 2002                   Martin Buckle.922 words

 

WAXWORKS

 

Beeswax is a very interesting and unusual substance.  Just what complicated mixture of chemicals it contains I leave to better chemists than myself, though I'm told there are over 300 compounds in there. Quite why the esters in the mix contain chains with even numbers of carbons but the hydrocarbons in the mix have odd numbers is an intriguing mystery to me. And how the wax is altered during its first working by the bee is also a mystery, since the scale of wax from a bee's wax gland is altered physically and chemically whilst it is manipulated in the bee's jaws and mixed with secretions from its mouth.   All this makes honey look pretty simple stuff.

 

The idea that you can 'purify' such a complex substance as wax is maybe a bit daft.  Certainly you can remove a lot of the dust and pollen that gets mixed with it, but in some places the pollen is an important part of the structure, as in cappings of brood, which have to allow the occupant to breathe. And there can be quite a noticeable amount of honey in natural wax, as well as propolis and water. So 'pure' wax is a human idea, not something a bee regularly comes across. Maybe that's why there are no two blocks of wax identical on the show bench, try as the owners may to make them as clean and wonderful as possible.

 

When I make things with my wax, I am never quite sure what the result will be. Sometimes the wax is brittle, making foundation or models fragile, and at other times it's much stronger. Sometimes the candles burn clear and quiet, at other times they crackle and spit as tiny drops of water explode into steam. And the colour is never the same twice.  This was brought home to me recently in Tobago, West Indies, when I was cleaning up some wax that my friend Francis Forbes had collected.  It was mostly cappings, which he had left out allowing the bees to remove most of the remaining honey. What was left was a tub full of a substance like sticky sawdust, and about the same colour brown. We also used a number of rolled up old combs that were lying about, many with wax moths beginning to eat them up.  The combs had mostly bleached in the sun to a pale grey colour. I thought it a great shame that wax should be left to the moths when it can so easily be reclaimed and turned to valuable uses. 

 

What surprised me was the colour of the resulting blocks of wax, which were a pinkish grey.  They had none of the yellow tint which British beekeepers are so used to. It occurred to me that in a country with no 'spring' there are not the masses of yellow spring flowers (think of daffodils, buttercups, celandines, OSR and many others) that we are used to. So the pigments, carotenes mainly, which colour wax yellow, are not there in any quantity.  On Tobago, which is only 5 degrees from the equator, the seasons alternate between wet and dry, the honey flow coming mainly at the start of the dry in January and February.  It's hot all the time with no cold season, and the local plants are probably not evolved with the honey bee even present – it is an introduced animal. We have to think of plants that are naturally pollinated by tropical insects, and even by birds. There were regularly humming birds in Francis' garden, visiting many of the same flowers that I had seen bees at. Birds have very different eyes from bees and red is particularly attractive to them as a flower colour, whilst pure red is a colour honey bees don't see at all. Maybe yellow is an inappropriate colour in such a place. Would yellow flowers bleach in the sun, I wondered?

 

What I was hoping to do on Tobago, apart from having a wonderful holiday and meeting lots of nice people, was to make local beekeepers more aware of the value of their wax and show them easy ways to clean it up and make foundation and saleable candles. 

 

Organised by the beekeepers' Chairman, Gladstone Solomon, and the very helpful lady from the T&T Ministry of Agriculture, Mrs MacDonald, we held a 'workshop' day at the Botanic Gardens in Scarborough (Capital town of Tobago) at which we made blocks of clean wax from a dirty mixture of old comb. And we cast candles that people could take home with them. This worked well and some of the faces were a delight to see as fancy candles emerged at last. 

There was general laughter at me when I suggested putting the freshly poured wax outside to cool – it was far cooler inside the air-conditioned lecture room than outside in the garden. But I was sad for her when one lady, seeing the nice wax we had made from unpromising 'rubbish' said "Oh dear! I threw away a whole lot of old wax only last week. I didn't realise it could be cleaned." The message had definitely got home in that particular case. 

 

So when you visit The National next year or the year after and see some unusual looking pale coloured entries in the wax classes, don't be surprised if you find that my friends on Tobago are getting to grips with the mysteries of wax casting. There are some very keen people there and they will be working at it, so watch out.