What's actually inside the Honeycomb?

Different types of cell

So, here we have a large frame of honeycomb. As you can see, it's made of lots of tessellating hexagonal cells.

As you can also see, not all the cells look the same. We have four types of cell here:

- Outside of the Frame- the lighter coloured cells are storing honey- Middle of the Frame- The middle cells store larvae- The yellow-green uncapped cells in the mid-top right store pollen
- The totally black cells dotted around are empty

They look... full

As you can hopefully see, the cells in the left of the frame are the same as those in the middle of the picture above. If you look closely, they seem to be bulging outwards- almost as if something is putting pressure on them from the inside...

I needed hands of a surgeon

... because there is. This is a bee larvae, about 6 or so days after being laid by the queen. It's squishy, white, and looks nothing like a bee. However, some metamorphic magic is about to happen.

A week or so later

Here we can see the pupae that the larvae turn into. They look just like a bee, but are milky-white. Once they've finished chilling in their cell, they eat their way out and get straight to work within 30 minutes or so of leaving their cell.

The food

Bees have two food sources, honey and pollen. Pollen provides protein (for the sick thorax gains) and honey provides energy.

To make honey, the bees regurgitate nectar into a cell, evaporate away some of the water by fanning their wings and repeat the process until the nectar is down to about 20% water, after which they cap it and store it for later.

It's runny

As we can see here, before it's turned into honey, the nectar is pretty runny and if the frame is moved around too much some of it can end up running out of the cell.

Luckily, there are bees on hand right away to clean up the mess.