The first use of beeswax that comes to mind for most people is candlemaking and sculpting in wax. Next, one might think of the batik dyeing ("resist dye") method of introducing patterns into fabrics. A sculptor or art enthusiast may think of the more complicated "lost wax" method to fashion the molds used for the casting of materials more durable than wax. Another valued art product relying on wax was the encaustic portrait, popular in ancient Egypt. Here's such a port

The demand for beeswax in personal care and pharmaceutics will remain high due to consumer demand for natural additives, organic ingredients and use of eco-friendly resources while those customers are turning away from chemicals and the side effects they are believed to cause. Another reason is just the naturally protective covering, soothing nature of wax itself.

Apitherapy is the medicinal use of products from bees includi ng venom , propolis, honey, pollen , and royal jelly. The last 3 are well-known for their use as nutritional supplements or in reducing allergic reactions. The first, venom, is used in research and in rheumatism and allergy therapeutics. For skin and wound care, honey is used in treatment of burns. Also, propolis in tinctures is used on wounds and to reduce irritation. Both propolis and honey are used with wax in

It's not surprising that bees would be attracted by a static electric charge, given their sensitive antennae and the hairs covering their bodies. The static charge causes deflection of the plumose hairs and is sensed by antennal mechanosensors. This article explains the mechanisms of this electrical attraction in detail: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1607426113

Honey bees are examples of super efficiency in the insect world in just about everything they do. Take flight for example. A fly (Order Diptera) has a wing beat of 62,000 per minute but a bee has greater maneuverability and range at less than 1/5 that number of beats or strokes per minute, about 11,500, or almost 200 wing strokes per second. For how a bee does it, see How Bees Fly demonstrated by Simon Rees at the National Honey Show - https://youtu.be/9UKo3NKuLkk . He show

As beekeepers know, every hive is different and some are more intent on one task or another: raising brood, making honey or collecting pollen. Although a colony may only eat about 44 to 65 lbs per year, they have been detected collecting up to 125 pounds per year. Some strains of bees have been selected and experimentally developed by researchers to collect pollen to the exclusion of the amount of honey needed to sustain the hive through winter.

Pollen is not all yellow or orange; bees find and collect quite a range of colors. This is particularly noticeable late in the summer in Western Washington State, when beekeepers see many colors of pollen as the bees pack away pollen stores for winter. When there is no major nectar flow to collect, a hive often turns more toward collecting pollen. The bees fill entire frames with pollens, often of many colors. At this time of the year, some pollen baskets are very visible on

Honey bees are not the fastest flying insects. In contrast, it appears to be generally agreed that dragonflies are among the fastest insects known at over 30mph being repeatedly measured. Honey bees are considered to fly at a maximum speed of around 15 mph, but in defense of the honey bee, look at all the duties of a worker bee – scouting and gathering nectar and pollen, hive defense, etc. Setting speed records is not part of her life’s work. However, that difference

It is believed that worker bees don’t sleep until they are foraging age. Until then they are cleaning, nursing the brood, tending the queen, heating the hive, warming the brood, processing the nectar and pollen gathered during the day and distributing food to all hive residents. No wonder they have no time to sleep! However, eventually the worker bee body has aged and changed to foraging after passing through a progression of the duties throughout her life. Those duties chang

Throughout the world, people eat insects in their egg, larval, pupal or adult stages, a behavior known as entomophagy. However, the only insect that produces a food that it eats and that humans consume as well, are the honey bees.

If the honey bee queen can lay over 1000 eggs per day during spring and summer when the hive is most populous and most active, the bees from those eggs must die at a similar rate some weeks later. Why do you not see that many dead bees per day in or near the hive? Worker bees only live about 6 or 7 weeks in spring or summer so 100s of bees must be dying every day! However, bees have very hygienic behaviors. One of these is that any bee that dies in the hive is removed by the

“Mad honey" is honey from the nectar of certain plants, particularly the Ericaceae family, which includes rhododendron, pieris and other genera that might sound familiar to gardeners. Symptoms of poisoning by ingesting this honey include dizziness, weakness, excessive perspiration, hypersalivation, nausea, vomiting and paresthesia, cardiac complications and possibly death. However, in the United States, honey bees have other sources of forage and rarely collect the nectar of

Or instead of harvesting that honey, the “honey bank” is right there in the beeyard, on hand to make up splits or nucs. No need to carry the honey frames in and out of the yard because they are where the beekeeper needs them. Sometimes internet videos call this having resource hives in your apiary, but all small scale hives are potential resource hives, and not just for honey frames. One colony has extra frames of pollen, another has capped brood, . . oh, this one has swarm

Propolis can be really built up inside the hive at the end of winter and makes the first full inspection difficult. One way to keep down the vibrations and resonance of hive inspection is to keep hive tools sharp and use those sharp edges to cut through propolis unstead of prying and forcing frames and boxes apart. Brute force always results in more banging and disturbance. Instead of prying each hive apart from the one next to it or from the side wall of the box, cutting bet

It's about the time of year that beginning beekeepers are watching for varroa on their mite count (slideout) boards of their screened bottom boards but aren't always sure what to look for. So here's a varroa mite right next to a standard size matchstick with 3 more mites in the picture. The one close to the match is shiny because you are looking at its back; the others may be belly-up, but the distinctive thing about them all is the "butter clam" shape. A varroa mite is not o

Swarm cells are planned by the workers and therefore are placed close to the center of the brood nest - the safest, warmest, most protected spot where the cells will receive the most attention. When the broodnest spans more than one box, the bottoms of the frames of the top brood box are prime locations for those royal cells. If there is no time to properly separate brood boxes for a full hive inspection, or too many hives to check them all thoroughly, often a beekeeper tilts

Worker bee life span during summer may only be 7 weeks, about 4 of them flying. During the winter some of the workers live 5 months or more. Drones live only one season if they fail to mate. If they mate, they die in the act. Queens have been shown to sometimes live for years but the average life span of queens appears to be decreasing.

The easiest system I have found, which also cleans hive tools so that they can't transfer diseases to the next hive inspected is a tupperware spaghetti pasta container with rubbing alcohol. Place hive tool inside and lay the container on its side so the alcohol covers the tool. It doesn't take much alcohol to clean tool after tool this way and the tupperware top seals super well. Oh, the daffodils are just in the picture to hide the clutter in my house. And the J hook is my f

Not necessarily: even a color as unusual as blue appears in pollen in nature. The color of the pollen may even be different from the flower from which it comes. Rusty Burlew of honeybeesuite.com writes fascinating, researched articles on this sort of topic with illustrations. Here's one on blue pollen, possibly the most unusual color we beekeepers see in in our hives: https://www.honeybeesuite.com/bees-and-blue-beautiful-blue-blossoms-for-happy-honey-bees/#h-the-allure-of-

An American pollen color chart is difficult to find. One of the reasons appears to be the size of the area of the United State, considering just the contiguous 48 states, and the number of climate and vegetative zones involved from the northern boreal zone to the subtropical. Our beekeepers (members of SnoKing Beekeepers Association) keep bees in Western Washington and find that pollen information to suit our cool maritime, temperate zone climate and vegetation can ofte