Beeswax is a 100% natural product, a complex mixture of fatty esters, fatty acids and hydrocarbon compounds. It helps to thicken and increase the film-forming power of your natural lip balms and lips. It is also appreciated for stabilizing the emulsions and producing highly protective creams, or for making natural candles. This organic yellow beeswax of exceptional quality will seduce you with its very soft touch and its delicious smell of honey.
The beeswax is secreted by the bees. They use it to build honeycombs. The wax is made from the white and transparent scales that appear at the opening of the four small pockets located on each side of the abdomen of the bee. "Strange sweat almost as white as snow and lighter than the down of a wing", whose production is produced by an increase in temperature "deep in the crowd" agglomerated into a cone (Maurice Maeterlinck, La vie des Bees, Book III, chapters 12 and 13).
The chemical ingredients of beeswax are: Hydrocarbons: 14%; Monoesters: 35%; Diesters: 14%; Hydroxy-polyesters: 8%; Free acids: 12%.
The beeswax (especially that of the capsules) is recovered by fusion by the beekeepers, sometimes by means of a solar oven. For beekeeping, it is entrusted to a "gaufer" who will transform it into pre-printed sheets of alveoli, which will invite the bees of the hive to reconstruct their rays inside moving frames. Beeswax is also used by cosmetics manufacturers for beauty products such as creams, lotions, ointments and lipsticks. It is also used for the manufacture of medicines, candles and sometimes for the waterproofing and maintenance treatment of certain materials such as wood, leather and even metal. It is also authorized as a food additive (E901). Its hydrophobic and antibacterial properties made it one of the main ingredients of mummification by the embalmers of Ancient Egypt. Beeswax is also used to treat split hooves in animals. In Asia and Africa, beeswax is used to dye batik fabrics. It is also used to make most mouthpieces of didgeridoo.
Beeswax can be stored for a long time. Its transformation is simple, a heating and filtering process is sufficient to prepare the wax, which can be sold in small pieces without special protection.
Finally, the wax has particular chemical and physical properties:
– A density of 0.96, the wax floats on the water
– A melting point of approximately 63 ° C.
– Malleable at room temperature
– Water insoluble (hydrophobic)
– Liquid when melted (not viscous)
– Long shelf life
It is totally incredible that with thousands of bees that come and add their small piece of wax to where the "lengthening" is going, you did not get a thousand different variations in shape and thickness . You are led to the conclusion that each of these thousands of insects must itself be a graduate engineer.
Each bee adds only a tiny portion to a given area of the ray. However, each cell is found with the same size and shape as all other cells. From the apparent disorganization and chaos to the little happiness of work on the rays, comes the perfection of uniformity. When you observe the work while it is in progress, you even feel that each bee is being constituted as an inspection team made up of a single individual. She examines the work, places her hand here and there, and then returns to go about her business. With thousands of bees that do, you get one not sure how this perfect finished product.
(Murray Hoyt, The World of Bees, p. 99 et 100)
