In the study, Smith set up 12 colonies in the field with frames that lacked the usual wax and wire inside, so the bees could build natural honeycombs without guides. Sometimes the bees will switch from building one type of cell to the other, but they make that change gradually, over multiple cells, which suggests they are thinking ahead, Petersen said. The authors refer to these pairs and triplets of irregular cells as “motifs” and show that particular combinations occur more often than expected by chance. Along with building cells of different shapes, the bees also build irregular-sized cells, and sometimes even combine multiple types of irregular cells. “When they build something out of wax, they’re being as frugal as possible,” said Smith, who is also an affiliate member of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior at the University of Konstanz in Germany.Īs a result, the bees employ other shapes – pentagons or heptagons – in order to link together panels of perfectly hexagonal drone and worker cells. Also, for honey bees, wax is the most expensive material energetically, Smith said. “Whatever action they take in one place effectively decides what’s going to happen later,” Petersen said. One issue is that bees don’t remodel their cells.
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A challenge – and some forethought – arises when the bees must link lattices made of smaller cells with the larger ones, because the geometries don’t allow for a seamless fit. ’17, assistant professor of biological sciences at Auburn University, who began this work while he was at Cornell.īees are known to build two types of hexagonal honeycomb cells: small ones for rearing worker bees and larger ones for rearing drones, the male reproductive bees. “Understanding how evolution can lead to these organisms that have architectural tricks gives us insights into how you can build structures that are multipurpose, strong, and resilient to different environmental perturbations,” said first author Michael L.
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“In this fundamental study, we looked at a naturally evolved system which solves similar challenges in a near-optimal manner,” said Kirstin Petersen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering and a co-author of the paper. Special imaging of natural honeycombs and computer modeling revealed that worker bees will change the tilt, size and geometric shapes of cells to meet different building challenges, according to the paper, “Imperfect Comb Construction Reveals the Architectural Abilities of Honey Bees,” published July 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Note that irregular five- and seven-sided cells are also used along the merge lines. Credit: Kirstin Petersen/Nils Napp/ProvidedĬells marked with different colors to show their orientations reveal how different patches in the comb are built with a consistent tilt when the bees merge two patches.