Beeswax Colour Variations

Beeswax colours can vary greatly from hive to hive and location to location. You may have noticed slight variations in our candle colours and of course our eye-catching beautiful white beeswax candles (our white beeswax is NOT bleached)!  In Canada we have several regions that produce high quality, pesticide free honey and beeswax. 

The natural variation in the colour of the wax harvested from bee hives is a result of the type of pollen and nectar being collected by the bees. This of course also changes a bit field to field, crop to crop and region to region. 

When beekeepers extract the honey, they cut off the wax caps from each honeycomb cell with an uncapping knife or machine. This wax is known as "cappings wax" and is the highest quality of beeswax. Its colour varies from nearly white to brownish, but most often a shade of yellow depending on purity, the region, and the type of flowers gathered by the bees.

Other types of beeswax include wax from the brood comb of the honey bee hive, and tends to be darker than wax from the honeycomb. Impurities accumulate more quickly in the brood comb. Due to the impurities, the wax must be rendered before further use. The leftovers are called slumgum. The wax may also be clarified further by heating in water. As with petroleum waxes, some beeswax manufacturers may soften the wax further by dilution with mineral oil or vegetable oil to make it more workable at room temperature.

We do not ever dilute our wax and we exclusively use 100% pure Canadian cappings wax for our candles.

About those white candles....we achieve the very light colour by filtering and filtering the wax to remove residual honey and pollen from the wax. The result is close to the original colour of the wax when first made by the bees (white) and has only a very very faint smell of honey. While the white wax is not pure white, we find the soft white (or ivory) to be extremely beautiful! 

What about the other colours of our beeswax candles? 

We make these colours by adding natural dyes derived from plants and earth sources. We mix our natural dyes with our cappings beeswax to achieve the specific colours we love, and then dip our candles into that dyed wax to achieve the exterior colour.

This means that the interior of our colourful beeswax candles and tapers is actually the natural yellow of our beeswax ensuring that your candle burns as cleanly and beautifully as possible!