From Hive to Wick: How We Make Our Candles

A pillar candle with added designs.

Candles are a form of art to me. Not only is this candle sourced entirely from South Jersey hives, but it combines the traditional pillar style with added bear & tree details to set a scene.

The first hive product that most people think of is honey, and with good reason! Honey is an excellent sugar substitute, super versatile as a condiment, and, let’s be honest, simply delectable when eating straight from the jar. I love honey because the bees take a bit of your local flower ecosystem and process it into this beautiful food that we can all enjoy, it connects us to the environments right outside our homes.

I like beeswax for similar reasons, but with one important difference: unlike honey which is made with the help of flowers, the bees make their beeswax all by themselves! Because of this, I think enjoying beeswax candles creates a connection directly between an individual and the hive it came from.

Like most things in the hive it all starts with the worker bees, who secrete wax from glands right on the undersides of their abdomen. When the bees find a big enough spot that they want to build in (which they find by linking together and measuring the space with their bodies, so cool!) they’ll begin to secrete these wax scales, chew it up, shape it, and place it down as comb. The bees will also process nectar into honey and, just when it is ripe, put it in honeycomb and cover it up with wax to store it.

This is where we come in. Beekeepers have a harvest season for honey and part of that includes taking off these wax coverings, called cappings, so that we can spin out the honey and return the honeycomb to the bees. The cappings can’t be returned to the bees though, and since we don’t want to waste a single bit of effort put in by these beautiful insects, we painstakingly melt it down and purify it into heavenly smelling white-yellow beeswax blocks. When we’re ready, we’ll melt this pure beeswax and make candles by pouring it into molds with a candle wick run through it!

As a beekeeper, there’s a little bit of imposter syndrome when people are amazed at what you do. We have a little secret in the industry, and that is that we do little of the really cool stuff. The bees have that honor, they put in the work that not even humans can replicate, and in return we try to give them a good home and proper care. Wax candle making is a perfect example of this: the bees made this beautiful and borderline sacred material all by themselves! All we did is harvest, process, and shape it into a candle. I like to think of us as simple messengers, bringing the beauty of this product straight from the hive to you.

One of our candles burning. The owl is one of the first candles I made, and still a consistent favorite of many

Be sure to check out our Instagram page @HoneyHarvestApiary for more!