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In Europe, a Bee Hive contains a colony of honeybees, Apis Melifera.  Other species may be kept in Asia.
Honeybees are social insects, like ants, bumble bees and wasps, as they live in colonies - a single honeybee, even a queen, would not survive by itself. The colony forms a super-organism.
The whole colony will survive the winter, they do this by storing honey in the summer for use in the winter when they are not able to forage for food.
A beehive could contain up to 50,000 bees, and may produce a surplus of 50Kg of honey each year which is available to the beekeeper to harvest. Of course they produce much more than this but use much of it themselves; they need about 20kg. of stored honey just to survive the winter.
The Bees
There are 3 "castes" of bees -
 The queen - she is a lot longer than the other bees, and there should just be one queen in a colony. Her main job is laying eggs, and she can lay up to 1500 eggs - her own body weight - in 24 hours. She is important to the colony - not only does she lay all the eggs, but also produces special chemicals (Queen Substance, containing phermerones) which help the bees communicate. If she were to be lost, the bees would convert one of the eggs that she had already laid into a queen by feeding the egg with Royal Jelly.
Worker bees - almost every bee in the hive is a worker; they are very versatile - from  the moment they hatch they work, starting off as nurses for the colony and then through a series of jobs (including undertakers, who clear out dead bees from the hive, and guards protecting the colony from wasps and other "robbers" ) until they become foragers, who collect pollen, nectar and water, the basic needs of the colony. They are all female, but sterile.
 Drones - these are the males of the colony and it is thought that their only function is to mate with a queen. They are thrown out in September, and the colony over winters without any. Drones emerge from larger cells that workers, and the queen measures each cell before laying an egg into it - it is a large cell she will not put a sperm with the egg and so the males emerge by parthenogensis, and are hapolid. In small cells, the eggs are fertilised, and develop into females.
Honeycomb.
It is made from wax, which the bees make in glands under their abdomens, and form into the perfect 6 sided cells. Each cell slopes downward slightly this helps stop the honey falling out!
The bees use the honeycomb as a store, honey factory and even a maternity hospital!
The Brood Cycle.
The Queen lays eggs at the very bottom of each cell (right) , and they hatch after just 3 days - they look like little dots at the very bottom of the cell,
 Larvae are the next stage in a bee's development. They are little white grubs in the cells. They grow for 5 days in this stage before the bees put wax cappings on the cells - it will then be another 13 days (for a worker) during which it pupates, and becomes a fully grown bee -she’ll then they start work at once!
Food
Bees need two different types of food
 pollen - this is a dry powdery material, often yellow or grey depending on the flowers it was collected from (poppies produce black pollen!). The bees carry this in "baskets" on their back legs (left) - The bees need pollen for protein. They store it in the cells (right), packing it in by headbutting it
They also need nectar - unripe honey. The bees collect it and turn it into honey by putting it into cells (below, right) adding enzymes, and by blowing air over it with their wings to evaporate surplus water. When it is ripe it contains about 18% water, and the bees then cap it with wax to keep it safe until they need it in the winter (or until the beekeeper comes and takes it away!).
Hive Products
In addition to the obvious crop of honey, beekeepers harvest wax, and the harvest can include propolysis, a resinous material that the bees use to line the hive; Royal Jelly, the food that bees give to larvae; pollen, and even the venom from stings (for medicinal use).
The year
During the winter the colony is dormant, but not hibernating - all the bees form a cluster about the size and shape of a rugby ball, inside the hive; they huddle together and shiver, and so keep each other warm. The queen does not lay any eggs at all and there will be no brood developing.
As the weather improves the queen will go into lay and the colony will start to develop and grow in numbers; the bees will fly on suitable days (warm, dry, calm) either to defaecate, or to forage if there are suitable plants nearby. The colony increases in numbers from about 10,000 bees to up to 50,000 in the summer. The hive should be at its fullest in about June and July, when the honey crop flows in, and then the queen will reduce the number of eggs laid and the colonies population will gradually decline. Eggs that are laid in the autumn develop into winter bees, who's life will be about 6 months; summer bees may live for only about 7 weeks (the queen could live for 6 years!).
The reason that bees make honey it that it is their winter stores, and so they literally fill their larders with food so that they can survive the winter. Most other insects do not store a surplus of food, and so will not survive the winter as a colony - wasps, and bumble bees both differ from honey bees as the colony dies off in the autumn, but before this happens queens emerge from the nest, mate, and then overwinter. Honey bees overwinter as a colony of about 10,000 bees.
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