[1] The novel is set in Madrid in 1943, after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and deals with the poverty and general unhappiness found in Spain by examining a multitude of fictional characters in varying levels of detail.

The novel itself is composed of two hundred and fifteen fragments separated by a blank space, grouped into seven chapters of different lengths.

The events of La Colmena occur in three days in December 1943, a date deduced from a news story which Rómulo the bookseller reads in a newspaper, where Martín Marco's proclamation also appears.

If you were to read the novel in a traditional manner, you would need to re-order the chapters in the following order: I, II, IV, VI, III, V, Final.

In La Colmena, Cela combines two linguistic levels, the cultured and the popular.