Took me a while to find a beech bowl with heart up on the shelf, because it's hardly my favorite wood, but I did find this 10.5" example. I quick turned it to round for the photography. Apologies for the flourescent green, but I always seem to forget the compensation settings. Anyway, american beech Fagus grandifolia as indicated here http://www.cnr.vt.edu/DENDRO/DENDROLOGY/syllabus/factsheet.cfm?ID=47 . Top left is face grain flat, complete with the honeycomb checks it's famous for, and a touch of spalt. The giveaway is the quarter grain at top right, where the ray flecks are quite obvious, if not as numerous as American sycamore.
Bottom two are as close as I can go to freshly turned dry wood, with the left showing long grain and the flecks, right showing end grain and the rays that produce the flecks linking the annual rings.
Second shot is of the bowl, turned to make round, showing why it's not the best wood in the world for flat work, or even faceplate turnings. Distortion is excessive, as the bowl has lost a full 7/8 inch of diameter, where more accomodating woods like cherry would lose less than half that, and even birch, a big-time mover, only about half. Look at the drop on the sides as an indication of the big 2:1 radial tangential shrinkage ratio.