If you buy a beeswax candle online, there is a good chance the person who poured it has never met a bee. That is not an accusation; it is just how the industry works. Wax gets bought by the case from a supplier, poured into a jar ordered from a second supplier, labeled with a sticker printed by a third, and sold as hand poured. Every word of that is technically true. Somebody did pour it by hand.
We wanted to tell you how ours actually get made, because the difference is most of the reason we started doing this.
It starts with the hives
Candle making came first for us, but bee keeping quickly followed as we fell in love with doing things from scratch. Back when we were just a family on a quarter-acre lot trying to produce more of what we used, bringing in bees felt like the next natural step. The wax was a happy byproduct. Bees build comb to store honey, and whenever we harvested, we were left with beeswax. Before long, we had more wax sitting around than we knew what to do with—and that’s when our candles found their true foundation.
Rendering the wax
Raw comb does not come out of a hive looking like a candle. It comes out looking like a hive: wax, bits of honey, propolis, and the occasional piece of everything else that goes on in there. It gets melted down slowly and filtered, more than once, until what is left is clean wax with that faint sweet smell that beeswax has on its own.
That smell is the reason our Honeycomb candle has no fragrance added to it at all. There is nothing to improve on.
The part where our bees cannot keep up
Here is the part most companies would leave out of a post like this.
Our hives do not produce on a retail schedule. Bees work to the season, not to the fourth quarter, and there are stretches, usually the busy ones right when everybody wants candles, where our own wax simply is not enough. When that happens we buy wax from another beekeeper a short drive from us. It is the same operation our bees originally came from.
So the honest version is this: most of the year the wax in your candle came off our hives, and in the busy season some of it came from theirs. Either way it came from hives we can drive to, kept by people we know, in the same corner of Michigan. What we will not do is quietly fill the gap with a case of wax from a distributor and keep saying the same thing on the label.
We would rather tell you than have you assume.
The jars and the lids
The jars are engraved here, by us. So are the lids. That is not a step we expected to be doing ourselves when we started; it happened because we could not find anybody to do it the way we wanted at the size we needed. So we learned it.
It means a jar can be empty and still be worth keeping, which is the point. People send us pictures of ours holding paperclips and hair ties and spare change. We are even working on a refill option for the future so you can keep burning a candle in the same jar year after year and it never ends up in a landfill.
The pour
Everything is poured in small batches at our house. A new scent gets poured for us first and has to live on our own counter for a while before it goes on the site. Some of them do not make it. The ones you see are the ones that stayed.
Our scented candles are a beeswax blend rather than straight beeswax, because pure beeswax does not carry fragrance the way a blend does. The Honeycomb candle is the exception, and it is pure beeswax precisely because it is not carrying anything.
Why any of this matters
It probably does not matter for every purchase. If you want a candle that smells like apple pie, plenty of them will smell like apple pie.
But if you have ever picked up something labeled handmade and wondered how much of it was actually made by the hands in question, that is the question we are trying to answer here. We keep the bees. We render the wax. We engrave the jars, print the lids, and pour the candles. When we have to go outside that, we go one town over and we tell you about it.
That is the whole thing. Thanks for reading, and for supporting a business that runs out of a house with corn in the front yard.
Abbie and Shawn
Honeycomb & Harvest, Otsego, Michigan