Most people have eaten honey. Many people enjoy beeswax candles. Far fewer people have stopped to ask where either of them actually comes from — and what an extraordinary process lies behind both.
At Beeswax Bay Farm, we think about this a great deal. Our candles are made from pure beeswax, and beeswax and honey are deeply connected — two products of the same hive, produced by the same bees, through processes that depend entirely on each other.
In our companion post From Flower to Flame: How Bees Make Beeswax, we explained how beeswax is produced inside the hive. This post covers the other half of the story — honey — and how it begins with a single bee landing on a single flower somewhere in the English countryside.
Before we follow the process, it helps to understand the purpose.
Bees do not make honey for human consumption. They make it for survival.
A honeybee colony in the UK faces a serious problem every winter: the flowers stop blooming, the foraging stops, and the bees cannot leave the hive for months at a time. Without a stored food supply, the colony would starve. Honey is that food supply — energy-dense, long-lasting, and produced in quantities large enough to sustain tens of thousands of bees through the coldest months of the year.
Everything about honey production is shaped by this need. The efficiency of the process, the extraordinary teamwork involved, the way the bees seal and preserve their stores — all of it exists to solve the problem of winter survival.
The fact that humans find honey delicious is, from the bee's perspective, entirely beside the point.
It begins with scout bees — experienced foragers who leave the hive in search of food sources. When a scout finds a good patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs one of the most remarkable behaviours in the natural world: the waggle dance.
hrough a precise series of movements — the angle of her body, the duration of the dance, the number of waggles — she communicates to her fellow bees the exact direction and distance of the flowers relative to the position of the sun. Other bees watch, learn, and set off in exactly the right direction. It is a navigational system of extraordinary precision, and it works without a single word being spoken.
Once a forager bee reaches the flowers, she gets to work immediately. She is looking for two things: nectar and pollen.Pollen is a protein-rich food used to feed young bee larvae. Pollen-collecting bees pack it into specialised baskets on their hind legs — tiny structures called corbiculae — and carry it back to the hive in bright yellow or orange clumps that make them look, endearingly, slightly lopsided in flight.
Nectar is what becomes honey. The bee extends her proboscis — a long, flexible tongue — into the flower and sips nectar, drawing it up and storing it in a specialised organ called the honey stomach. This is entirely separate from her digestive stomach — a natural storage vessel that holds the nectar safely during the flight back to the hive.
A single forager bee can visit up to 1,500 flowers on one trip. When her honey stomach is full — sometimes equal to her own body weight — she returns to the hive.
Back at the hive, the forager bee does not deposit her nectar directly into a honeycomb cell. Instead, she passes it mouth to mouth to a waiting house bee — a younger worker who has not yet begun foraging.
This transfer — called trophallaxis — is not simply a handover. During the process, the house bee adds enzymes to the nectar from her own glands. These enzymes begin breaking down the complex sugars in the nectar into simpler sugars — primarily glucose and fructose — that are easier to store and less likely to ferment.
The house bee then passes the nectar to another bee, who passes it to another, and so on. Each transfer adds more enzymes and reduces the water content slightly. By the time the nectar is deposited into a honeycomb cell, it has already begun its transformation into honey.
Raw nectar contains around 70 to 80 percent water. Honey contains around 17 to 18 percent. Removing that water is the central challenge of honey production — and bees solve it with one of the simplest, most elegant mechanisms imaginable.
They fan their wings.
Thousands of bees line the honeycomb and fan in unison, creating a powerful airflow through the hive that accelerates evaporation from the open nectar cells. The hum of a beehive — audible even at night when no foraging is taking place — is largely the sound of this fanning. The bees are, in effect, running a natural dehydrator around the clock.As the water evaporates, the nectar thickens. Its sugar concentration rises. The risk of fermentation drops. Slowly, over several days, it becomes honey.
When the honey has reached the right consistency — when its water content has dropped to approximately 17 to 18 percent — the bees seal each cell with a thin layer of fresh beeswax.
This wax cap is called the capping. It preserves the honey in a near-perfect state, protecting it from moisture and contamination. Properly capped honey does not spoil. Archaeologists have found honey in ancient Egyptian tombs, sealed in clay vessels, that was still perfectly edible thousands of years later.
This is the point at which honey and beeswax meet most directly. The wax used to cap the honey stores — called capping wax — is some of the purest, lightest-coloured wax in the hive. When beekeepers harvest honey, they slice off these wax cappings to release the honey. The cappings are then melted down and filtered, and they become the high-quality beeswax used in products like ours.Every candle we pour at Beeswax Bay Farm is, in a very real sense, a direct product of the honey-making process.
Responsible beekeeping does not take honey from bees at the expense of their survival. A healthy, well-managed colony will produce significantly more honey than it needs for winter — often many times more. A responsible beekeeper harvests only the surplus, always leaving the colony with enough stores to survive the colder months comfortably.
At Beeswax Bay Farm, we source our beeswax from Devon beekeepers who share this approach. The wax we use is a genuine by-product of sustainable honey production — not something harvested at the colony's expense.When you burn one of our candles, you are benefiting from a process that has been managed sustainably and ethically from the very beginning.
A single worker bee will produce approximately one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime. To fill a single jar of honey requires the lifetime work of around 12,000 bees — and the visiting of approximately two million flowers.
We find it almost impossible to look at a jar of honey, or light a beeswax candle, without thinking about that number.It puts things in perspective, and it is one of the reasons we take so much care over what we make. The bees worked hard to produce the raw material. The least we can do is use it well.
If you would like to follow the complete journey — from flower to hive to beeswax to finished candle — we recommend reading both this post and our companion guide From Flower to Flame: How Bees Make Beeswax together. They tell the full story of what goes into every candle we pour.
You can also read about our specific sourcing process in The Journey from Hive to Home, and learn more about The Role of Bees in Our Ecosystem and why protecting them matters far beyond honey and candles.
Every candle we sell carries the natural honey scent of Devon beeswax — the same wax produced through the process described above, by bees visiting wildflowers in the English countryside.
Browse our handmade beeswax candles, explore our Candle Gift Sets, or visit our Signature Collection for something truly distinctive.
Before you light your candle, please take a moment to read our Candle Care and Safety guide — it will help your candle burn beautifully for every hour of its life.