MEDINA, Ohio — Making fine candles is a delicate balance of science and art. The right wax has to be combined with the proper wick for the best burn. Colors have to match exactly from batch to batch. Even the fragrance and hue of a candle need to be perfectly paired to meet consumers' expectations.

Those kinds of details are the business of Medina, Ohio's 140-year-old A.I. Root Co. Root has been in business since 1869 and early on made its mark as a manufacturer of beekeeping equipment.

But its founder, Amos Ives Root, set the stage for the company's current focus by rolling sheets of beeswax from his hives around wicks to create altar candles, which are still Root's flagship product.

Today, Root candles light churches and homes across the United States and beyond.

The company added decorative candles in the 1960s and now produces between 2,000 and 2,200 decorative products in Medina and almost 2,000 liturgical products in Ohio and in San Antonio, said company president Brad Root.

Founder A.I. Root originally repaired and made jewelry in a store on the Medina square. As Brad Root, his great-great-grandson, relates the story, honeybees swarmed the store window one day in 1869, and A.I. had a worker capture the colony in a box.

His wife was not pleased. "You paid a day's wage for a box of bugs," she supposedly told him. But the acquisition sparked in A.I. a fascination with beekeeping.

He saw a business opportunity in finding a better way to harvest honey, and he went on to standardize beekeeping equipment.

Although A.I.'s company has since gotten out of beekeeping, it continues to publish the monthly Bee Culture magazine and keeps a few hives for the edification of the magazine's editor, Kim Flottum. Flottum even advises the keeper of the White House's hive and helped figure out a way to keep the bees in check so they wouldn't annoy the participants in this year's Easter Egg Roll.

BEESWAX DESIRABLE

Today, the Root Co.'s focus is primarily on candles, but beeswax — most of it from Iowa's Sioux Honey — remains an important ingredient. It's always been used in Root's liturgical candles, and now it's blended with other natural waxes in a new line of home fragrance products called Legacy by Root.

Beeswax, Brad Root explained, is desirable because it burns slower than other waxes. And in combination with other soy- and vegetable-based waxes, he said, it does a better job of emitting fragrances.

Some of the candles are made by pouring melted wax into tempered-glass jars. Some are made by dipping wicks repeatedly into hot wax in a computer-controlled version of the method used by early Americans. Some candles are formed in molds. Still others are made by compressing wax pellets that resemble snow.