Honeycomb for regulating an ideal wax temperature for building the comb. 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
5-cell honeycomb omnitruncated 5-cell The "tops" of the 5-cells in this honeycomb adjoin the "bases" of the 5-cells, and vice versa, in adjacent laminae (or layers); but alternating laminae may be inverted so that the tops of the rectified 5-cells adjoin the tops of the rectified 5-cells and the bases of the 5-cells adjoin the bases of other 5-cells. This inversion results in another non-Wythoffian uniform convex honeycomb. Octahedral prisms and tetrahedral prisms may be inserted in between alternated laminae as well, resulting in two more non-Wythoffian elongated uniform honeycombs. The rectified 4-simplex honeycomb or rectified 5-cell honeycomb is a space-filling tessellation