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
Cubic honeycomb Cubic honeycomb The cubic honeycomb or cubic cellulation is the only regular space-filling tessellation (or honeycomb) in Euclidean 3-space, made up of cubic cells. It has 4 cubes around every edge, and 8 cubes around each vertex. Its vertex figure is a regular octahedron. It is a self-dual tessellation with Schläfli symbol {4,3,4}. John Horton Conway calls this honeycomb a cubille. The Cartesian coordinates of the vertices are: It is part of a multidimensional family of hypercube honeycombs, with Schläfli symbols of the form {4,3...,3,4}, starting with the square tiling, {4,4} in the plane. It is one of 28 uniform