If you want to increase your chance of successfully attracting a swarm, you can add an attractant to your bait hive. Lemongrass is very similar to the queen bee’s scent. Honeybees find the mixture of lemongrass and beeswax irresistible. Yield: 3 ounces Ingredients 2 tablespoons beeswax 1/4 cup olive oil 40 drops (2 milliliters) lemongrass […]

  Wicker Garden Furniture Much of the garden furniture today is made of plastic rather than wood. If you are lucky enough to have a set of old-fashioned wicker or bent willow garden furniture, you can use this recipe to keep it in top shape.   Yield: 1 (12-ounce) jar Ingredients 1/2 cup beeswax 1/2 […]

Preserving the wood used to enclose raised garden beds is a conundrum. Popular wood preservatives contain toxic heavy metals that leach into the soil of a vegetable garden, potentially contaminating the soil and any food growing there. But because garden boxes are exposed to the weather and remain perpetually damp, some kind of preservative is […]

These wax tarts replace chemical room fresheners, promoting healthier indoor air. These are useful in the kitchen to remove dank odors without toxic chemicals. Each wax tart is about 1 1/2 ounces. This project includes three homey scents: citrus, calm, and alert. Yield: 5 wax tarts Ingredients 1/2 cup beeswax 1/2 cup cocoa butter 1/2 […]

Beeswax Crayons Every fall, boxes of crayons come home with the school supplies. Most crayons are made with paraffin wax and stearic acid. Soy crayons are made with hydrogenated genetically modified soybean oil. Some brands of crayons may contain lead and asbestos. So while technically, crayons are “nontoxic,” they are not necessarily benign. You could […]

Visiting more than 2 million flowers to produce a single pound of honey, bees are some of the hardest workers on our planet—and quite possibly nature’s best cosmetologists. These wondrous winged creatures pollinate about one-sixth of the world’s flowering plant species and about 400 agricultural plants, and from their hard work springs forth a plethora […]

Honey is as sensational as it is sweet, but if you thought that honey-making was the only work occupying bees inside that hive, think again. A mind-boggling array of insect activities is creating amazing honeybee products right under our noses. And our noses themselves even benefit, since some of these products can be used to treat allergies […]

As the beekeeping season comes to a close and my hives need less of my time, I’m confronted with the jars and bags and racks and bowls of beeswax all over my house patiently awaiting my attention. There are a million methods for all things beekeeping out there but I’d like to share this very […]

Christmas shopping just got easier after making a batch of my lavender honey-scented body butter. Easy to whip up in a couple of hours, this body butter is a smooth emollient welcome on winter parched skin. And what better way to put to use the beeswax & honey that I gathered from the hive this summer? […]

As a beekeeper for over 20 years, I have accumulated pounds of beeswax as a welcome product of my hives. A substance formed by insects, it is simply amazing that it has been used for millennia, even found in the tombs of pharaohs, caulking the ships of Vikings. Think of it as the duct tape […]