A beehive is the home where a colony of bees lives and works together. Inside, thousands of honeybees build intricate honeycombs from beeswax, with six-sided cells stacked together like tiny apartments. Each cell serves a purpose: some store honey and pollen (the bees' food), while others hold developing baby bees. The queen bee lays eggs, worker bees gather nectar and pollen from flowers, and the whole colony functions like a miniature, buzzing city.

Wild bees often build hives in hollow trees or caves, but beekeepers provide wooden box-shaped hives that make it easier to harvest honey without disturbing the bees too much. A single healthy hive might contain 50,000 bees during summer, all cooperating to survive.

The word also describes a distinctive hairstyle from the 1960s, where hair was teased up high and rounded on top, resembling the dome shape of a traditional straw beehive. When someone says a place is like a beehive of activity, they mean it's buzzing with people working busily, just like bees in their hive.