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
Honeycomb structure as far as we can see, is absolutely perfect in economizing labour and wax”. The first paper honeycomb structures might have been made by the Chinese 2000 years ago for ornaments, but no reference for this has been found. Paper honeycombs and the expansion production process has been invented in Halle/Saale in Germany by Hans Heilbrun in 1901 for decorative applications. First honeycomb structures from corrugated metal sheets had been proposed for bee keeping in 1890. For the same purpose, as foundation sheets to harvest more honey, a honeycomb moulding process using a paper paste glue mixture had been patented