If you pick two icons to represent beekeeping to the general public one is probably a skep and the other, more often than not, a WBC hive. What gives the last its distinctive graphic shape are lifts. In this design the real hive body is hidden beneath a wooden outer sleeve made up of horizontal sections, and the roof is placed over the top of the sleeve. Each section approximately corresponds to each layer, each box, of the hive body, but because the boxes inside come in two heights and the outer sleeves in one the match is not exact. Each piece of the sleeve, each lift, narrows slightly from bottom to top, rather like an upside-down drinking cup, and the pieces stack and nest in just the same way. Added one-by-one as the colony and hive inside expands during the season this creates a pyramidal tower, rather like a pagoda without the upward curving roof.