My husband used to keep bees and yes, beeswax seems expensive... but wax production is a highly specialized task performed only by the young worker bees.
They make it between about day 12 and day 21 of their life (I think I read that it's normally only for a week).
Each bee can only produce a maximum of 10 milligrams in this time.
Wax honeycomb is made by thousands of bees over quite a long period.
It's not really expensive in these terms!
I hope someone comes along with suggestions... but bear in mind that if it's too cheap it's probably not real.