Honeycomb

If the honeycomb is too worn out, the wax can be reused in a number of ways, including making sheets of comb foundation with a hexagonal pattern.

Broodcomb becomes dark over time, due to empty cocoons and shed larval skins embedded in the cells, alongside being walked over constantly by other bees, resulting in what is referred to as a 'travel stain'[2] by beekeepers when seen on frames of comb honey.

In support of this, he notes that queen cells, which are constructed singly, are irregular and lumpy with no apparent attempt at efficiency.

[5] In 1965, László Fejes Tóth discovered that the trihedral pyramidal shape (which is composed of three rhombi) used by the honeybee is not the theoretically optimal three-dimensional geometry.

A cell end composed of two hexagons and two smaller rhombi would actually be .035% (or about one part per 2850) more efficient.

This difference is too minute to measure on an actual honeycomb, and irrelevant to the hive economy in terms of efficient use of wax, considering wild comb varies considerably from any mathematical notion of "ideal" geometry.