This is fascinating. Worker bees–which live about five weeks in the summer–make wax from about the 10th day of their lives to the 16th. When workers are roughly 10 days old, they develop special wax-producing glands in their abdomens. They eat lots of honey. The glands convert the sugar in the honey into wax, which seeps through small pores in the bee's body leaving tiny white flakes on its abdomen. These bits of wax are then chewed by the bees. The chewed wax is added to the construction of the honeycomb. The cluster of bees means the hive temperature stays at around 35 degrees Celsius, which keeps the wax at just the right consistency–it's not too hot to be drippy and not too cold to be brittle.

Bees build combs to store honey to fed themselves through winter when there are no flowers. Honeycombs aremade up of six-sided tubes. Mathematicians have figured out that the shape is very efficient–it uses less wax for the volume of honey held, than other shapes (triangular or square tubes).