What it is
Beeswax is a wax that worker bees produce from eight glands on the underside of the abdomen, extruding it as tiny scales they then chew and press into the six-sided cells of the comb. It takes roughly 1,100 of those scales to make a single gram, which gives you a sense of how much work a lump of it represents. Chemically it is a mix of esters of long-chain fatty acids and alcohols, solid at room temperature and melting at around 62 to 64C, which is why it holds both a shape and a shine. The FDA is blunt about where it comes from, defining beeswax as the wax honeybees secrete as the structural material of the honeycomb, collected once the honey has been drained or spun out. All of which is the whole verdict in miniature: it is built by an animal, for that animal's own use, so it falls outside a vegan diet.
Where you'll meet it
In food, beeswax earns its keep as a glazing agent, the additive E901, giving fruit and sweets a glossy coat that seals in moisture and holds off mould; the FDA files it under surface-finishing agents and lubricants. That waxed sheen on a supermarket apple, the shell on some jelly sweets, the coating on a few hard-cheese rinds: those can all be beeswax. Away from the plate it thickens lip balms, hand creams and eye shadow, burns in candles, and buffs into furniture polish. On an ingredients list it usually reads plainly as 'beeswax' or E901, which makes it one of the easier animal products to catch once you know the words. The trickier cases are vague labels that say only 'glazing agent', worth a quick query, because that shine is not always plant-based.