Beeves is an old-fashioned plural of beef, meaning multiple cattle raised for their meat. You'd find this word in historical accounts or old Western stories, where a rancher might say he's driving a hundred beeves to market or needs to count his beeves before winter.

Today we usually say “cattle” instead, making beeves sound wonderfully archaic, like something from a cowboy tale or a pioneer's journal. If you read in Little House on the Prairie about farmers trading beeves, or in a historical document about a ranch's inventory of beeves, you'll know they're talking about beef cattle.

Beeves mostly disappeared from everyday speech by the early 1900s, though it occasionally pops up when writers want to give their language an old-time flavor or are describing historical ranching operations.