Contents of a has_many collection

Hi,

I need some help understanding when fields of a Rails model are updated. In this case, it's about the fields of a has_many collection.

I have a hypothetical model beehive, which has_many(:bees). In the controller, I do (example is abstracted):

bees = Array.new

params["bees"].each_value do |bee_attributes|   bee = beehive.bees.build(bee_attributes)   bees.push(bee) end

beehive.bees = bees

This all works fine, except when I try to access the bees of beehive again, which I need for validations. I made a validate method in beehive which runs by all the bees to check some stuff (what is not important). The problem is, that the bees collection I have access to in the validate method still contains the values from the DB, which were loaded when this model was loaded with an "edit_beehive" action. Similarly, if I do this:

beehive.bees = bees # the line from above bees = beehive.bees

my bees have all been reverted to before I edited them.

I really don't understand this. Some help would be appreciated.