Honeycomb Honeycomb A honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal prismatic wax cells built by honey bees in their nests to contain their larvae and stores of honey and pollen. Beekeepers may remove the entire honeycomb to harvest honey. Honey bees consume about 8.4 lb (3.8 kg) of honey to secrete 1 lb (454 g) of wax, so it makes economic sense to return the wax to the hive after harvesting the honey. The structure of the comb may be left basically intact when honey is extracted from it by uncapping and spinning in a centrifugal machine—the honey extractor. If the honeycomb
Tetrahedral-octahedral honeycomb the vertex arrangement of the disphenoid tetrahedral honeycomb, dual honeycomb of the uniform bitruncated cubic honeycomb: It is also the body centered cubic, the union of two cubic honeycombs in dual positions. The kissing number of the D lattice is 8 and its Voronoi tessellation is a bitruncated cubic honeycomb, , containing all truncated octahedral Voronoi cells, . The [4,3,4], , Coxeter group generates 15 permutations of uniform honeycombs, 9 with distinct geometry including the alternated cubic honeycomb. The expanded cubic honeycomb (also known as the runcinated tesseractic honeycomb) is geometrically identical to the cubic honeycomb. The [4,3], , Coxeter