Crafting useful and delicious items from honey and beeswax is a time-honored tradition that can greatly enhance your enjoyment of keeping bees.
Beeswax and Honey Crafts
There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of raising bees and enjoying the sweet, golden honey harvested from your own hives. However, this simple pleasure is just one of the many ways you can make use of the output from bee colonies. Beekeepers have used honey and beeswax for thousands of years to craft their own hand-made products such as soaps, mead and candles.
Make Your Own Soap
Making your own soap with honey and beeswax harvested from your own hive is a time-honored tradition. Dadant & Sons offers a Beginners Soap Making Kit that includes everything you need (other than lye — see note below) to get started in this rewarding hobby.
Note: Many recipes for making your own soap call for the use of lye, also known as sodium hydroxide. This material is very caustic and requires careful handling and storage. Be sure you understand how to safely use and store lye before bringing it into your home or workshop!
Make Your Own Mead
Mead is a delicious alcoholic beverage made with honey, water and yeast. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of mead-making equipment that is over 9000 years old, which predates the oldest known evidence for beer and wine! With the Wine & Mead Making Kit from Dadant & Sons, you too can practice this ancient art with honey from your own hives.
Make Your Own Beeswax Candles
Long before the advent of the modern electric light bulb, people cherished beeswax candles for their warm glow and pleasing scent. While most hobbyist beekeepers don’t harvest enough beeswax for making more than a few candles, Dadant & Sons offers several candle making kits that include unbleached, filtered wax.
Our Candlemaker Beginner Kit, for example, includes three pounds of ivory beeswax along with molds and all the accessories you need to pour your own candles. Hand rolling sheets of beeswax is another fun and easy way to make beautiful candles. Dadant & Sons offers a wide range of colors of honeycomb-pattered wax sheets that are perfect for crafting by artisans of all ages and skill levels.
Filtered and Unbleached Beeswax
The above projects are just the beginning of what you can do with beeswax and honey. We are constantly inspired by the many ways artists and crafters use these natural materials in interesting and inventive ways. Whether you want to try your hand at encaustic painting or need a natural way to tackle home improvement projects, Dadant & Sons offers 100% pure, unbleached beeswax.
Do you have a favorite way to use the output from your honey bee hives? Let us know and send us a message on the Dadant & Sons Facebook Page!
Have questions? Give us a call at 888.922.1293 or contact the closest Dadant branch.
For beekeeping equipment and educational materials, visit our online store.