This is a close-up picture of honeybees working on comb in a beehive. The comb is made up of thousands of six-sided (hexagonal) wax cells built together in neat, adjoining rows. This picture shows some cells to be empty (the light-colored ones). The darker cells contain larvae, and the capped cells contain pupae, which mature within the cells into adult bees.
The empty cells could soon contain a single honeybee egg, laid by the queen. The empty cells could also be filled with pollen, nectar, or honey. The field bees collect the pollen and nectar and give it to the worker bees within the hive. The worker bees deposit the nectar into the cells, then evaporate the water from the nectar (a process known as curing), until it contains only about 18% water. At that point, the nectar has become honey, and the worker bees will cap (seal) the honey cell with wax, storing it to be eaten later.
If a queen lays an egg in a cell, it will mature into a larva, then a pupa. The worker bees on the comb will seal the pupa over with a cap, and the pupa matures into an adult bee within the capped cell. When mature, the adult bee emerges from the cell and begins working at its various jobs in the society of the bee colony.
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