Hive no.1 was also a gentle hive, which had recently swarmed, so half of its former occupants had flown off with the old queen to find another home. The remaining bees were not quite so laid back as no. 2, but not as angrily volatile as 4. The first thing you notice is that all the boxes making up a hive are stuck together with a reddish-brown glue. This is called propolis, and it is made from plant resins collected by foraging bees. It's a type of insect Artex, and wild bees coat the insides of hollow trees with it when they found a colony, to make it clean and weatherproof.
Bees are very sensitive to smells.
The hive is a simple piece of carpentry by man, not bee. It is placed on a stand to keep it off the bare earth, and on top of that, an alighting board and entrance. As before with the wasps, this entrance can be narrowed so that the guard bees can defend their hive against predatory insects and small mammals. On top of this is the brood chamber consisting of thousands of hexagonal wax cells where the queen lays her eggs and the young bees are tended. On top of the brood chamber is a queen excluder, which stops the queen bee, who is quite a lot larger than the workers, getting up into the honey chamber and laying eggs there.