Beeswax

Beeswax is secreted from glands on the underside of a worker bee's abdomen, as small flakes that the bee chews and works into comb. It is not collected from flowers and it is not honey: the bee makes it from sugar, at a cost of something like six to eight kilograms of honey per kilogram of wax, which is why wax was historically the more valuable product of a hive.

Chemically it is a mixture of a few hundred compounds — mostly long-chain esters, with free fatty acids and hydrocarbons — which is why it softens over a range instead of melting at a point, and why it is plastic at hand temperature and workable without heat.

That combination is unusual and is the reason it has so many unrelated uses. It is waterproof, it is stable for millennia, it takes and holds fine detail, it is edible, and it melts at a temperature a person can reach with a pot of water.

Lost-wax casting is the one with the largest consequences. A model is made in wax, coated in clay or plaster to make a mould, and the wax is melted and poured out — 'lost' — leaving a cavity the exact shape of the model for metal to be poured into. Nearly every bronze sculpture in history was made this way, and the process is still how jewellery, dental crowns and turbine blades are cast. It works because wax holds detail, melts cleanly and leaves no residue, and nothing else natural does all three.

Candles, and specifically the good ones. Beeswax burns brighter and with far less smoke and smell than tallow, and it was expensive enough that church and hall used it while households used rendered fat. The Catholic Church specified beeswax for altar candles, which for centuries made monasteries substantial beekeepers.

Polish and protection. Furniture and floor wax, leather dressing, thread wax for saddlery, the coating on some cheeses, and the wax on a bowstring or a drawer runner. It is the traditional water-resistant finish for wood and does not crack the way a hard varnish does.

Sealing. Wax seals on documents, waxed thread, and the wax-and-resin caulking of everything from a beehive to a boat.

Cosmetics and pharmacy, where it is the structuring agent in a great many ointments, balms and lipsticks — it thickens an oil without making it greasy, which is a specific and hard-to-replace behaviour.

Beeswax residues have been identified on pottery from the Neolithic across Europe, the Near East and North Africa, which makes beekeeping — or at least honey hunting — one of the older human relationships with an animal.

Egyptian use was extensive: in mummification, in shipbuilding, and in encaustic painting, where pigment is bound in hot wax. The Fayum mummy portraits are encaustic and their colours are as strong now as when they were painted almost two thousand years ago, which is a better preservation record than any oil painting has.

In medieval Europe wax was a currency of sorts. Tithes and rents were paid in it, because the church's demand for altar candles was constant and the material does not spoil.

Its industrial displacement came in the nineteenth century from paraffin wax and stearin, both petroleum or tallow derived and both far cheaper. Beeswax kept the uses where its specific behaviour mattered and lost the ones where it was simply a wax.