Beeswax is a UI for querying Hive, a
data warehousing system built on top of Hadoop.
Navigate to different views in the beeswax UI by using the toolbar at the top of the application window.
The "Query" view lets you enter queries in Hive's Query Language, HQL, which is quite similar to SQL. Queries can be named and saved.
When you submit a query, a server ("the Beeswax Server") uses
Hive to run the queries. You can either wait for the query
to complete, or come back later to find the queries
in the "History" view.

Though you can create tables by issuing the appropriate HQL DDL query, it is easier to create a table using the Table Creation Wizard. You will be asked to name the table, specify storage parameters (essentially, how columns and rows are formatted), and specify the regular and partition columns.
Use the "Tables" tab to see the available tables, preview
their data, and examine their metadata. You can load
more data into the tables from here as well.

The History tab presents queries that have been run
previously. Results for these queries are often
available for some time, and then are automatically
expired.

Queries can be saved, and then browsed using
these views. If a query is not yours to edit,
you may "clone" it to edit your own version.

When viewing the results for a query,
notice the "Log" tab to see logs presented
by Hive. These will help you to debug
your query. The results view will also have
links to any MR jobs started by the query.

Underneath the covers, Beeswax is using a very slightly modified version of Hive 0.5.0.