Beeswax, as all the bee products, is a miracle of the beehive. The comb is built up from nothing and serves as a house, a nursery, and a food pantry. Bees have figured out that by building their combs into hexagons, the combs hold the most amount of honey and require the least amount of wax. The combs also serve as the perfect area for a bee to undergo its metamorphosis from egg to bee.
More specifically, it is a wax that is secreted from eight wax-producing glands on the worker bee’s abdomen. Beeswax is typically produced by the younger house bees when they are between twelve and twenty days old. As the bee grows older and begins to collect pollen and nectar, these glands start to atrophy, but their ability to produce beeswax doesn’t disappear completely. When bees swarm they will rapidly produce wax comb, since they need to quickly create a place for the queen to lay eggs and to store food somewhere.
