Here at Valley Mist skin care, we feel that we’ve created the ultimate lip balm that is gentle, nourishing and all natural. In the original Valley Mist lip balm, a large part of that natural content is our organic beeswax. There’s no beeswax in the Vegan balm…don’t worry.
Honey bees happily produce a number of wonderful natural substances .. honey from nectar and propolis from resinous tree buds, as well as the all important wax. Beeswax is secreted by worker bees and is actually clear when first produced, only becoming opaque when it is processed in the hive for construction. The beneficial properties of beehive products are well known and these properties cannot be synthesised.
Our own beloved British Bees were lucky to have a hive situated in a most idyllic location, a beautiful English nature reserve surrounded by diverse flora for foraging. (Take a look at our gift cards … that is one of our first beehives in the nature reserve from way back in 2014!) Nestled on a hillside sheltered by Hawthorne and Hazel trees which looks out onto an open valley with a river running through it, the only thing that disturbed the hive’s activities is the odd inquisitive Jacobs sheep. Our Bees were pretty much left to live as nature intended, with minimal interference from us – after all bee ‘keepers’ mainly just interfere with and hamper normal hive activities! During the Winter months we always made sure that their stores of honey and packed pollen were ample (bees store pollen as well as honey, this is their protein) and we only liberate the odd frame for ourselves in the Spring after the bees have eaten what they need to get them through the Winter. That’s why they work so hard to store it all Summer after all, not for our benefit! It is common for bee keepers and particularly commercial bee keepers to remove all of the honey and feed a colony cheap refined sugar to get them through the Winter. It’s just not natural, and in our opinion surely can’t be good or them.
The plan for the beeswax in our lip balms was originally to use wax produced by our own hard working girls (all worker bees are girls by the way, the boys are called drones and just loaf around the hive freeloading). Since then our naive view of manufacturing cosmetics that conform to regulations has been somewhat realigned, and we have used a like minded retailer of bees wax for our initial supplies until we are in a position to have our own wax tested and certified.
