Buying Beeswax by the Pound in Idaho

I sell beeswax by the pound here in Idaho, in the Treasure Valley, in two grades. Most of the people who buy it from me are making something. Candles, salve, lip balm, waxed canvas, furniture polish, a lotion bar for a market table of their own. They show up with a recipe and usually the same three questions. Which kind do I need, how much do I need, and what will it cost.

This page answers all three.

What you get

Poured slabs. Not pellets or pastilles or a bag of little discs. The wax comes off our combs, gets poured into a form, and sets into a bar. You cut or break pieces off as you use them.

That matters more than it sounds. Pastilles are handy, and they’re also the most processed and most expensive form wax comes in, because somebody melted, filtered, cooled and pelletised it before selling it to you. A slab has had less done to it and costs less for the same reason.

There are two grades, and the line between them sits at 25 pounds.

	Filtered	Unfiltered block
Weight	Under 25 lb	25 lb and up
Price	$10 a pound	$8 a pound
Filtered by	Me, by hand	Nobody
Best for	Candles, balms, salves, anything on skin	Polish, waxed canvas, woodwork, sealing

The price difference is the filtering and nothing else. It’s the same wax off the same combs. One of them has had my time put into it.

Filtered or unfiltered, and which one you need

If it burns or it goes on skin, buy the filtered. If it’s going on a workbench, the unfiltered block is the better buy and you won’t notice what’s in it.

Unfiltered wax still has what the hive left in it. Bits of comb, propolis, pollen, and now and then a piece of a bee. None of that is dirty and none of it will hurt you. It’s also why unfiltered wax smells sweeter and darker than filtered wax, and some people want that.

It becomes a problem when the job needs the wax clean. Debris in a candle sits in the melt pool and gets in the way of the burn, so a taper made from unfiltered wax will gutter and tunnel where a filtered one won’t. In a salve or a balm it won’t blend smoothly, and you end up straining it yourself at the point in the recipe where you least want to be straining anything.

If you’re waxing canvas or finishing wood, none of that applies. You’re melting it into oil and rubbing it into something, and a fleck of propolis in a tin of furniture polish is invisible.

There’s a longer version of this in Filtered or Unfiltered Beeswax?, including the few cases where the answer goes the other way.

What people make with it

Candles are about half of what leaves here. The rest is skincare, waxed fabric, and people fixing things around the house.

Here’s roughly how much of each recipe is wax, by weight. You need that number before you can work out how much to buy.

What you’re making	Wax, by weight	Grade
Pillar or taper candle	100%	Filtered
Container candle	60% to 100%, the rest a softer oil or wax	Filtered
Lip balm	20% to 25%	Filtered
Salve or skin balm	8% to 20%	Filtered
Lotion bar	About 33%, with butter and oil	Filtered
Waxed canvas	Around 50%, cut with oil	Either
Furniture polish	15% to 25%, the rest oil and solvent	Unfiltered
Encaustic paint medium	80% or so, with damar	Filtered

A few things people ask about that aren’t in the table. Wax works as a cutting board finish mixed into mineral oil. It’s fine for waxing thread, drawer runners and the cut ends of a grafted branch. It works as a cheese wax, but that job wants it clean and thin, so take the filtered and expect to strain it again.

Candles are what I get asked about most, and it’s where the grade matters most, because a pound going into a candle is a pound you can watch burn.

How much wax a batch takes

One pound of wax fills about four 4 oz containers, three 6 oz, or two 8 oz. Plan on losing five to ten percent in the pot and on the sides of things, because you will.

That’s for candles. In a balm or a salve, wax is usually somewhere between eight and twenty five percent of the recipe by weight, so a pound goes a lot further. At fifteen percent it carries about six and a half pounds of finished balm.

The math people get wrong is the big order. If you’re pouring a hundred 4 oz candles for a market, that’s about twenty five pounds of wax before waste and closer to twenty seven with it. Twenty five is where my price steps down, so ordering twenty seven pounds instead of twenty four costs less extra than most people expect.

The full table is in How Much Beeswax Do You Need?, with the container sizes nobody lists.

Melting it without wrecking it

Beeswax melts between about 143 and 145 degrees Fahrenheit. Above 185 it discolours for good, and there’s no fixing it afterwards.

Both numbers come from the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium, which is the extension service at the University of Delaware. They know a lot more about wax than I do. Melt it low, stay under 185, and you keep the color and the smell you paid for.

Never melt it over direct flame. Beeswax is flammable and it will catch, and a wax fire is not something you want to put out in a kitchen. Use a double boiler, or a bowl standing in a pan of simmering water. It’s slow on purpose.

One more thing. A pot with the thermometer reading 160 can still have spots on the bottom well past 185. That’s where most mystery discolouration comes from. Stir it. There’s more in Melting Beeswax Without Ruining It.

Storing it, and the white film

Keep it dry and out of direct sun and it will outlast you. Beeswax found in Egyptian tombs was still workable.

The thing that worries people is bloom. After a few weeks a slab gets a soft white film on the outside, like the dust on a plum. It isn’t mold and the wax hasn’t gone off. It’s the softer parts of the wax working their way to the surface as it settles, and it happens to every unrefined natural wax.

You can buff it off with a soft cloth if you don’t like the look. If the wax is going into a melt pot it doesn’t matter at all, because it disappears the moment the wax turns liquid. Bloom tells you nobody added anything to stop it. The usual reason a wax never blooms is that it’s been cut with paraffin or a hardener.

Two things do damage wax in storage. Sunlight fades the color over months, so a slab on a windowsill ends up paler than the one in the cupboard. And wax picks up smells, so don’t store it next to anything strongly scented unless you want that in your candles.

Wrap it or box it, put it somewhere cool, and forget about it until you need it.

Where this wax comes from

It’s our own, off our own combs. About 500 hives, every one of them on an organic farm around the valley, by agreement with the farmer who works it.

That’s the part I care about most, and it’s why the wax is what it is. A hive eats whatever grows where you set it down, and wax is built out of what the bees bring home. Put a hive somewhere that gets sprayed and that goes into everything the hive makes, wax included. I wrote out why that rule exists and what it costs to keep in Why Our Hives Sit on Organic Farms.

Idaho requires any beekeeper running more than 50 colonies to register with the state Department of Agriculture. At 500 hives we’re well past that. Good to know if you’re buying wax from someone and wondering how they’re set up.

What it costs, and what shipping does to that

Ten dollars a pound filtered. Eight a pound for a block of 25 or more. Nothing gets added at the end.

Order a single pound online instead and by the time it lands on your porch you’re usually somewhere between fifteen and forty dollars, because wax is heavy and shipping heavy things costs money. A pound of something dense that doesn’t have to cross the country is cheaper. That’s all it is.

Buying in quantity moves the number, and I work that out one order at a time instead of publishing a bracket table nobody fits. Text me the weight you actually need.

Questions to ask any wax seller

Not only me. If you’re buying wax anywhere, these four tell you most of what you’re paying for.

Is it pure beeswax? Wax gets cut with paraffin and with microcrystalline wax. Both are cheaper, and in most places neither has to be declared the way food ingredients do. Cut wax doesn’t bloom, burns differently, and smells of very little.

Was it ever overheated? Above 185 degrees Fahrenheit wax discolours for good and loses its smell. Dark wax that smells of nothing has usually been cooked at some point, and melting it gently at your end won’t bring it back.

What form is it in, and why? Pastilles have been melted, filtered, cooled and pelletised, so they’ve had the most done to them and cost the most per pound. A slab is the least processed form there is.

Where were the hives? People skip this one, and it decides the most. Fat-soluble things concentrate in wax more than in honey, and the wax is going into candles burned indoors and balms rubbed into skin. Ours sit on organic farms by agreement with the farmer. I wrote out that rule here.

A seller who can’t answer all four is buying it from somebody else. That’s fine, but then the answers are somebody else’s to give.

How to buy it

Send an order through the site, or text me. Either way I confirm what’s on the shelf, we sort out when and where you’re picking it up, and you pay by Venmo when you collect it.

There’s no card checkout and no shipping option, because I don’t ship. Everything I sell gets handed to somebody in the Treasure Valley.

If you’ll be buying wax regularly, say so when you get in touch. It’s easier for both of us if I know a standing order is coming than if I find out when you turn up.