Hive Mind?

I began my reference photo resource with this kind of image in mind - the kind of beehive found in a Winnie the Pooh cartoon. Surprisingly, I couldn't find very many actual Pooh images (this one is a mural someone painted for a child's room) or photos of hives like the one I had envisioned. 

I found a few images that looked like this one, but they were all illustrations and no photos. 

So I did some beehive research and found out that a "beehive" proper is almost always manmade. The one pictured here is called a "skep" and is actually a basket-type structure used by beekeepers. There's a little opening for the bees to fly into but no structure inside, so they have to create their own honeycombs. The troubles with skeps are 1) the keeper cannot check up on the colony throughout the season and 2) honey can't be harvested without destroying the whole structure (that's why the big box-type hives are used more often).

Here are some dudes making traditional skeps.

So what about this type of nest? It's the shape I was thinking of, but a very different texture. this is actually a wasp nest made out of a paper-like substance that they produce. Bees, on the other hand, make wax and tend to nest inside preexisting structures instead of making their own. 

An exposed bee nest looks like this. Crazy!

So many things I did not know before! I don't even know who I am anymore.

Now, I don't want to go all Winnie the Pooh for a serious art project, but I decided I still wanted to draw inspiration from my original thought. Even though that kind of beehive is an amalgamation of a wasp nest and a skep, it's the first thing I pictured and I think it's pretty iconic and recognizable. It's also a simpler shape to reproduce in fleece. 

Photos of hive creation forthcoming.