2026.06.16: Beekeeping, year #4

2026-06-16 09:05 by Ian

Winter was mild. All three of my hives survived.
I fed them a bunch of sugar and synthetic pollen so they could get a head-start on buffing their numbers. This appears to have worked really well. By the time the silver maples were blooming, all but one hive was at full strength.

The hive I captured last season is shaping up to be the strongest producer. Summer isn't over yet, and there are already two supers full of capped honey. My mentor and I have decided to put them to work filling out vacant frames with comb.

A little biochemistry...

The principle ingredient in beeswax are langth-variations of this molecule.

Bees make wax from honey, which is almost entirely monosaccharides (5 or 6 carbons per mol). The fatty acid component of the wax accounts for 8 carbons, and the long-chain alcohol has 26 (34 total carbons). If the bees are making wax entirely from glucose, that means that it can't possibly cost them less than 6 mol of glucose per mol of wax, structurally. Likely a few more after metabolic costs. Saturation of every carbon in the wax should produce water as a byproduct of dehydrating the sugars. I might do the thermochem calculations later, but I can already tell that is a tremendous energy cost.

I don't know the exact steps in the synthesis, but I'd guess that the caboxlyic acid, and the long-chain alcohol are anabolized separately, and joined as an ester as a final step, producing an additional mol of water from the condensation.

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