The Chemistry of Beeswax

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Publications on the physical constants for the comb waxes of Asian and European beeswaxes first appeared a century ago. It was soon shown that carbon chain length was, on average, shorter in the Asian beeswaxes than in A. mellifera, which explains the lower melting points of the former. The Asian waxes are more similar to one another than to A. mellifera. In Asian beeswaxes, the amounts of C31 and C33 in the pool of free fatty acids are reduced, but C25 hydrocarbons are increased compared to that of A. mellifera. The major compound families in beeswax are alkanes, alkenes, free fatty acids, monoesters, diesters and hydroxymonoesters, while fatty alcohols and hydroxydiesters are minor constituents. There are notable species-specific differences in the beeswaxes among honeybee species, but all share a complex mixture of homologous neutral lipids. The amounts of acylglycerols are the same in scale and comb wax, but diacylglycerols dominate the former and monoacylglycerols the latter. There are more double-bonded fatty acids in comb than in scale wax, and a greater saturation of fatty acids in comb wax. Beeswaxes analysed with high temperature gas chromatography yielded a characteristic elution pattern for waxes of each honeybee species. A parsimonious, unweighted, pair-group analysis based on the distribution of the chemical constituents for 82 elution peaks of the derivatized comb waxes of six species of honeybees. The Euclidean distances of the beeswaxes present a picture very similar to those obtained from morphometric, behavioural and DNA sequence analyses. The wax glands and the products of their secretions were highly conserved features during honeybee evolution.