Why do bees have sticky hair?
Why this joke works
A Honeycomb Used Like a Hair Comb
A honeycomb is the wax structure bees build from hexagonal cells to store honey and raise young. A hair comb is a toothed grooming tool. The joke separates “honeycomb” into “honey comb”: honey explains why the bees’ hair would be sticky, while comb explains how they groom it. The invented image works because the compound word already contains both the sticky substance and the grooming object the riddle needs.
A closer look
A Tiny Cartoon in Two Lines
The question gives bees a human grooming problem without explaining how they acquired hair. That absurdity is easy to accept because the answer immediately supplies a familiar object with the right name. The joke is especially visual: listeners can picture a bee dragging a honey-coated comb through a fuzzy head. Keeping the question brisk prevents anyone from examining the biology too soon.
Fact behind the joke
Bees Build Comb from Their Own Wax
Worker honey bees produce wax from glands on the underside of the abdomen, then use it to build honeycomb. USDA material describes the comb’s hexagonal cells as storage for honey and space for raising young. So the comb is real and highly engineered; only its use as a sticky hairbrush belongs to the joke.