The term "hexagon" comes from the Greek and means "figure with six edges". In every beehive there are many thousands of hexagons made of wax, the honeycombs. The wax of the combs is produced by bees with the wax glands of their bodies.

Why do bees build their honeycombs from hexagons, and not from squares, triangles or circles? The reason is that the hexagonal shape of the walls provides an optimal ratio of wall material to volume and offers high stability. This means that the bees need very little wax to store large quantities of honey in stable combs.

However, the hexagonal cells in the honeycomb have many more tasks than just storing honey. They are used for rearing larvae and storing food - honey and pollen.
 

When the beekeeper hangs empty wooden frames in the hive, the bees build up their honeycombs independently.

Depending on whether female workers or male drones are needed in the colony, the bees create smaller or larger cells.

For the creation shown in the picture the bees needed only a few days. If you look closely, you can see eggs in the cells.

Bees must build honeycombs, they follow their building instinct. If they do not find enough space in the hive to build combs, they build new combs in the most impossible places and in many different shapes. You can see it in this picture.

The clean, straight and right-angled arrangement of the combs is not an invention of bees, but of man. It makes the beekeeper's work on the hives easier: putting in and taking out the combs, replacing them and finally harvesting the honey: This only works if each comb hangs neatly in a frame and the frames are not built together by the bees.

That is the reason why the beekeeper gives the bees a construction template: A frame with a thin plate of beeswax on which the structure of cells is imprinted. This plate of wax is called foundation It is held by four thin wires which are briefly heated and thus melt into the wax of the foundation. This so-called "soldering of the middle wall" is usually done in winter, when the colonies are at rest and the beekeeper has nothing to do with the hives.

On this template the bees then pull up the cell walls in spring so that there is room for a fully-grown larva on both sides. In this way, they completely expand the honeycomb in a short time.

Here we see a honeycomb that is almost completely filled with covered worker bee brood.

After worker bees have cleaned the inside of the cells, the queen lays a tiny egg in the middle of the cell floor. The beekeeper also calls these eggs pens. From the egg cell the embryo develops. From this the larva of the bee develops. The larva is also called round maggot. It is fed by the nurse bees with food juice, a mixture of nectar and pollen.

Then the round maggot becomes an expanded maggot and the workers cover the brood cell. In the closed brood cell it undergoes a change of shape called "metamorphosis". During this process the pupa becomes an adult bee. She throws off her pupa skin, opens the lid and slips out of the brood cell.

After that the cell is cleaned by cleaning bees and the queen can lay the next egg.

On this picture you can see the queen bee. She is not easy to find: She is a little bit bigger than her sisters, has a longer and thicker abdomen and is also a little bit darker. Some beekeepers mark her with a colorful spot of paint on her shoulder to make her easier to find.

By the way, the queen in this picture is called Regina, which is Latin and means "queen".

The queen bee grows up in a special cell: the queen cell is much larger than the other brood cells. It is not oriented horizontally, but hangs vertically from the comb. Theoretically, every fertilized egg, from which a worker bee actually develops, can become a queen. Whether the female egg becomes a worker or a queen is decided only by bees. If a queen is to grow up, the larva is fed with a particularly large amount of food juice, the royal jelly. And the larva is given extra space in its royal cell.

Bees, like humans, need carbohydrates and protein as food and for rearing the brood.

The bees collect the protein in the form of pollen, which they bring to the hive on their hind legs as "pollen panties". They then stomp the pollen into the cells where it glows in a variety of colours. Then they cover it with a thin layer of honey to keep it airtight.

Now let's get to the most delicious chapter: Honeycombs :-)

When the cells are expanded, the bees fill them with nectar. They collect nectar from flowers.

At first the nectar consists of much water and little sugar. Little by little the bees extract the water from the nectar, so that it becomes more and more viscous with time. In the end it consists of a lot of sugar and only less than 18% water.

When the cells are full and the honey is ripe, the bees seal the honey cells with a thin wax lid. This way honey can be kept for many years.

When the combs are completely covered, the beekeeper can harvest the honey. A full honeycomb contains about 2 to 3 kilograms of honey.

The wax lids are removed with an uncapping fork, then the combs are extracted in a honey extractor.

The honey flows through a sieve to clean it from wax particles. It is then filled into jars.

The bees get sugar syrup as a substitute for the harvested honey.