Question: What do bees make their hives from?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

Bees will build their hives anywhere that gives them a nice sheltered spot, like a hollow in a tree trunk, a small rock cave, or a man-made hive which is pretty much just a wooden box.

They build up the hive inside by using beeswax as a building material, which the worker bees secrete. Beeswax is edible, but humans can’t get nutrients from it (although some birds can). It’s fairly strong and stable, and makes a good building material for bees. They sculpt the wax into sheets of hexagon cells (a very efficient shape that makes the strongest possible structure with the least amount of material), and they use them to store their honey and the eggs that will become new bees some day.

Some wasps build their nests by chewing up wood into pulp and building a big papier maché ball. But bees use wax.