Hexagons - A Bee Story

Bees are fascinating creatures. They pollinate plants to make them fertile. They produce wax. They turn pollen into honey. Yummy. Bees are beautiful.

Bees are also extremely clever. They make their own storage facility to deposit their honey. They produce honeycombs to store precious honey and lay their eggs. Honeycombs are made from wax hexagons. Have you ever considered why they chose to mould their wax into such a complicated shape?

Bees need to make cells to store their honey but they also need to be able to climb inside the cells. So why not make circular or triangular cells? Surely that would be easier. Well - consider a circular cell. When circles or cylinders are used to build a structure, the surface area that actually touches is very small. There are gaps and because they don't share much surface, the amount of wax used to produce a structure would be far greater. For the honey bee, producing wax is very energy intensive.

Bees need to build a structure that minimises the amount of wax they need to produce and a straight sided cell uses less energy. So why not build honeycomb with triangles? Consider the shape of a triangle. It narrows at the angles - this is not an easy shape to accommodate the bees body. The triangle would have to be bigger and use more energy consuming wax. 

So why chose a hexagon shaped cell?  During their evolution bees began to build hexagonal shaped cells in their honeycombs and there are several reasons.  Firstly the hexagon is a similar shape to a circle so it is a good shape to accommodate the bee's body, maximizing the volume of the cell. Secondly the six surfaces of the hexagon makes it strong, therefore the walls of the cell can be thinner. The hexagon has six flat sides that are shared with the adjoining cells, therefore less wax is required to produce the adjoining cells. As the energy needed to produce the wax is less, the bees have more energy to produce honey.

The hexagonal cell shape is structured in a way that several bees can work closely without overlapping. The construction of the hexagonal cells can be shared so that it becomes a building site with many bees working together, reducing the time and effort required to complete the structure. Oh what clever little bees.

Clever little honey bee,
Master of geometry,
Waxing cells in symmetry,
to store your pollen hoard.

Clever little honey bee,
Hexagonal assembly,
built for durability,
to store your honey gold.

Inspiring ingenuity,
A mathematic mystery,
Constructing your community.
Clever little honey bee.

Thanks for reading.  Adele