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Beeswax candles in quantities for church use--best US source?


KarenNC
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If your church or house of worship uses beeswax candles in a fair quantity and you are in the US, where do you get them? I'm trying to find resources to transition our church from using paraffin to beeswax. We currently use primarily small votives and tealights, along with a few pillars and dinner-sized tapers except for one candlelight service a year where we use a lot of short tapers, but are open to a possible change in the mix. Our main use is a sand table set with multiple votives, a single pillar, and two tapers we use as lighters, but we are considering whether it would be more practical to shift to something like a couple of large sand bowls and go to the longer thin candles that are more the size of incense sticks.

Bonus would be if the source is near to NC to cut down on transportation costs. Being close to a number of Moravian churches and having participated in several Lovefeasts, I did check some of their suppliers, but the ones I found are 20% beef tallow, which wouldn't work for our congregation. We are a mid-size Unitarian Universalist church, but are open to secular or religiously-affiliated suppliers of any group. My best current option seems to be either Holy Nativity Orthodox Convent in Massachusetts or Saints Mary and Martha Orthodox Monastery in SC.

Thanks!

Edited by KarenNC
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5 hours ago, amyx4 said:

This may not be helpful....I was gifted a beeswax candle from someone that raises bees for honey.  Can you located a hive owner in your area?

We have considered checking with the local beekeepers' association to see if they have anything that might work. 

 

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4 hours ago, TechWife said:

I'm not sure how the prices compare, but here is one resource:

https://www.salemcandleworks.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=1

I am not sure where our church used to get them - we didn't use them at all last year but used a couple thousand each year in previous years.

Thanks, but that's one of the sources I checked when I went looking for the Moravian candles. They're how I found out that, to my surprise, the Moravian candles are 20% beef tallow: "As with all of our candles, they are hand poured in North Carolina using a mixture of 80% pure beeswax and 20% beef tallow just as our colonial ancestors would have used.  We use only 100% cotton wicking to insure clean burning." Given the percentage of our congregation who are vegetarian, they wouldn't work very well for us, I'm afraid. 

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