Beeswax has been used in products for ages
and can be traced all the way back to the seventh century.
Today, Beeswax is still used in many products.
Specifically, beauty products for its superior moisturizing capabilities.
Burt’s Bees is a company that was founded on the principle that bees are magical.
It all starts with a bee.
Well...many bees.
Burt’s Bees sources their beeswax from Tanzania.
Using a combination of new and traditional methods these beekeepers are able to supply
half the wax used in Burt’s Bees lip balms and other products.
Traditional hives are suspended from trees and lowered down to access the honeycomb.
The honey is extracted, and the comb is boiled down to get the raw wax.
This wax is then sent to Burt’s Bees factory in North Carolina.
Here the raw wax is filtered until pure.
This purified wax is then made into pellets that are ideal for melting.
The raw ingredients that make up the lip balm are beeswax, coconut oil, sunflower oil, vitamin E,
rosemary leaf extract, and peppermint oil.
Each of these ingredients is measured out precisely and mixed with the beeswax.
This mixing tank holds the equivalent of 100,000 lip balms.
After mixing for several hours, the recipe melts down
to a smooth final liquid and is ready for filling.
Empty tubes travel through the filling machine at a rate of roughly 500 lip balms per minute.
The filled lip balms then go through two heating and cooling chambers.
This step is crucial to the texture of the lip balm and helps the beeswax formula avoid
cracking as it hardens uniformly to room temperature.
Caps are added one by one at a rate of 600 balms per minute.
A machine called the sorting hopper arranges the cooled balms in a row.
The tube is then ready to be labeled and hot stamped with a log code.
This code is unique to each lip balm, ensuring that each tube is traceable to its original batch.
There you have it!
This lip balm is now ready and waiting to cure any case of chapped lips.
Next time you grab this little tube, don’t forget to thank the bees!
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