As in the novel of the same title from Camilo Jose Cela, "La Colmena" is a sad composition with the stories of many people in the Madrid of 1942, just the postwar of the spanish civil war. The main theme of the film is the contrast between the poets, surviving close to misery under the Franco's regime, and the winners of the war, the emerging class of the people that makes easy money with illegal business.

Córdoba, Spain. Lord Killarney, representative of the British Museum, acquires an Arabic incunabulum at an auction; but he is murdered and the book disappears. All suspicions fall on El Lince, an antique dealer with a shady background, who asks his nephew to warn Curro Jiménez.

Antonio and Teresa are a couple who live in a flat in San Sebastian. Ursula Michelena, an elderly woman over 70 years old, lives on the top floor. Ursula is secretly in love with Antonio, whom he continually spies from one of the windows of her house. One night she sees Antonio and Teresa making love and that fact excites her violently, in such a way that she asks Antonio for a secret appointment and tells her that she is pregnant and that the son she is waiting for is his. Úrsula, according to her version, has become pregnant looking at Antonio and Teresa making love.

Cecilio Rubes, a businessman engaged in the manufacture of baths and toilets, tries to remain neutral in the imminent Spanish civil war. But the attitude of Cécil, his only child, a spoiled boy who grows without respect their parents, will forced him to face the cruel reality of the facts. Jumping back and forth in time, we are shown his present and his past through his wife Adela and Paulina, the mistress of father and son.

With the purpose of recalling a youthful adventure, Enrique, a well-placed merchant, decides to travel around Spain in the company of his wife Alicia and his two daughters, Pilar and Carmen.

During the last years of Franco's dictatorship, Fernando, an old republican exile, returns to his home in a small Castilian village and befriends Aurora, a young and attractive teacher.

Don Santiago, a forty-year-old owner of a pastry shop in Madrid de los Austrias, receives surprising news: a woman, in fact his real mother, leaves him with a brothel in England.