About Bee Lovely Candles
Bee Lovely Candles is located in Madison, Wisconsin. We make our 100% beeswax candles by hand, collected from our own bees and other local beekeepers. We make everything from tall tapers, to votives, pillars, and a whole swarm of fun shapes. Many of our customers like the color and aroma of natural beeswax, but we can also add colors and scents to our creations, and some of them are painted with acrylic paints. If you have a special candle in mind for a gift, wedding, or to match your decor, we also do custom work. Please bear with us as we update our site!
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Bee FAQ
Since ancient times, humans have been endlessly fascinated by bees and beelore. Bees are an extremely female-dominated species. The workers, guard bees, nurse bees, and Queen are all female. The only males in the beehive are called drones. They make up less than 10% of any given hive. In the bee world, females rule the roost! Whenever you spot a bee foraging on a flower or just buzzing around, you can safely assume it is a worker bee, and therefor female. It is a large misconception to call bees “he.” If you see a bee buzzing around, you can say, “Well, isn’t she cute.”
Drones are like those guys who eat all the stuff in your frudge, hardly chip in for rent, and hog up the couch and tv all day in your house! They are resource-consumers and don’t put very much help into the hive. The female bees do almost all the work. Drones exist because they are needed to reproduce with the Queen, and when they are done reproducing with her, they die and literally blow up. And, when the winter rolls around and the drones are mooching off of their sisters, the bees kick them out and they starve and/or freeze to death!
Another misconception is the role of the Queen. The Queen is bred from the minute she is born to be a Queen. She is fed Royal Jelly so that she becomes bigger than the worker bees. Her reproduction is amped up, whereas the reproduction of a worker bee is prematurely halted so that no other bee competes with the Queen. The Queen decides reproduction. That is what she exists for. All the other bees make the other important decisions of the hive, like where to relocate the hive and where to forage.
When bee biology was first systematically studied, (male) biologists incorrectly assumed the Queen Bee was a male, and termed her the King. Ofcourse, after more observation, their own anthropocentric bias fell by the wayside and she was retermed the Queen. But, even the term Queen has a bias of a class hierarchy. She was assumed to be the head of the hive who tells the other bees what to do. The only thing the Queen completely controls is the reproduction of the hive. She reproduces for two years on average and can lay thousands of eggs a day. She sends out chemical signals so that the other bees know not to reproduce. If, by any chance, the Queen dies or is killed, a worker bee may be summoned to be the lead breeder (though not a very good one) until a new Queen enters the hive.