The Bee Bench › Beeswax & Products

🕯️ Beeswax & Products

Wax is the crop most beekeepers throw away. Here's what actually comes out of a bucket of cappings, and what it turns into once it's clean.

1 · Rendering

Raw material (lb)

What you're rendering

Yields are typical, not guaranteed — how well you drain, how hot you run it, and how fine you filter all move the number. Old brood comb is mostly cocoon, not wax.

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Clean wax

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Slumgum & waste

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Raw value at market

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Cappings per 100 lb honey

1–2 lb

2 · What it makes

Product

Tube size (oz)

Wax share of the recipe (%)

Container / packaging each ($)

Other ingredients each ($)

Your selling price each ($)

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Wax per unit

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Material cost each

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Margin each

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Value of the whole batch

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Typical yields

Rendering	Clean wax	Why
Cappings, drained & washed	75–85%	Almost pure wax. The best material you will ever render.
Cappings, still sticky	55–70%	The rest is honey — wash it out first and you keep the honey too.
Burr comb, new white comb	45–55%	Clean but carries propolis and hive debris.
Comb after a season or two of brood	30–38%	Cocoons and cast skins make up most of the weight.
Old black brood comb	18–25%	Barely worth the propane. Render it for candles, not for skin products.

Wash the cappings before you render, not after. Sticky cappings are typically a third honey by weight. Rinse them in cold water, let the wash water settle, and you have the makings of mead plus a much better wax yield. Rendering sticky cappings straight scorches the sugar, darkens the wax, and throws away honey you could have sold.

Never render wax over direct heat. Beeswax flashes at around 400 °F and it will find an ignition source. Double boiler, solar melter, or a slow cooker with water in the bottom — and never unattended. A wax fire behaves like a grease fire, so water makes it worse.

Keep the grades separate. Cappings wax is pale and clean and belongs in lip balm and candles where colour and smell matter. Brood comb wax comes out brown and smells of the hive — fine for foundation, furniture polish or fire starters. Mixing them means everything you make is the quality of the worst thing in the pot.

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