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-octahedral honeycomb There are 5 related uniform honeycombs generated within the same family, generated with 2 or more rings of the Coxeter group : , , , , . The rectified cubic-octahedral honeycomb is a compact uniform honeycomb, constructed from cuboctahedron, and rhombicuboctahedron cells, in a cuboid vertex figure. It has a Coxeter diagram . The cyclotruncated cubic-octahedral honeycomb is a compact uniform honeycomb, constructed from truncated cube, octahedron cells, in a square antiprism vertex figure. It has a Coxeter diagram . It can be seen as somewhat analogous to the trioctagonal tiling with truncated square and triangle facets: The cyclotruncated octahedral-cubic