The Truth about "Wholesale"...
The important thing that's constantly misunderstood by people trying to start a home business on the Internet is the word Wholesale.

Most people think that working with real wholesale suppliers means that they will magically be able to sell products for less than anybody else on the planet, for ever and ever. They'll be the only one who ever gets such good prices, and they'll earn millions because no competition can touch them. They retire, and buy a big house in Beverly Hills, complete with a butler, and the whole works!

Then they realize they may actually have to compete with companies who have more buying power and get better prices, and suddenly the dream's over. They run around crying that the supplier is not a real wholesaler, and is a cheat. The sky is falling, and  all their dreams are being blown away by BAD people who 'falsely' claimed to be wholesalers. The fact is that they've realized a perfectly normal aspect of retail sales that they had not anticipated, and need to learn.

The term "wholesale" is relative, no matter who your distributor is or how you find them. What you get as a small business is a supplier's genuine "first level" wholesale price.

For more precise Wholesale Amber Bead info, here are my official, No bull, No fluff links relevant to your search so I really recommend checking these out now:

Important Bead Facts & Tips:

Beads are the oldest and most universal art form. Beads have been used throughout the ages and in virtually every culture, not just as adornment but as an expression of social circumstances, political actions, or religious beliefs. Beads have also been widely used as a form of currency; as a symbolic representation of curative power; and as protection in the form of a talisman. Ancient ancestors used readily available raw materials such as bone, horn, teeth, ivory, stones, nuts, seeds, shell, wood and a variety of plant and insect resins as beads. By using these natural materials, man created all styles of artistic ornamentation for himself. The variety was vast and ranged from headdresses, hats, caps, hair combs, earrings, and necklaces to bow quivers, waist belts, breast ornaments, skirts, cloaks, and shoes.

A very popular type of bead is...

Powder Glass Beads (a.k.a. sand-cast beads)
There are two methods used for making powder-glass beads. The technique in Ghana originated in the 16th century, and begins by grinding up glass from bottles, jars, or other beads. The crushed glass is poured into molds and placed in an oven. Craftsmen then use a metal pin to shape and perforate the liquid glass before it is set.

The second system also starts with finely ground glass, but no molds are used. The fragments are held together with a binder such as saliva or gum arabic and spread over a grass stem or bottle-glass core. After fusing in an oven, the beads may be rolled in other fragments to created colorful patterns.