The hexagonal shapes found in a honeycomb are often used in product packaging to suggest to customers that the item contains honey or another bee product such as royal jelly. However, despite the fact that hexagons are widely recognized as being associated with bees, it's probably fair to say that few people know how bees actually build honeycombs or construct their hives.
Here we provide a brief overview:
First step - find a location
Bees raised by beekeepers have a ready-made space to build their hive. Typically, colonies will receive artificial straw, pottery, or wooden structures designed to be a suitable place for the bees to build their honeycomb. The honeycomb is, essentially, a mass of wax cells built by the bees to contain larvae, honey stores, and pollen.
Wild bees, on the other hand, generally choose to build their "nest" (a term referring to a colony built in the wild as opposed to an artificial setting) in hollowed-out wood, rocky crevices, under roofs, and generally anywhere that offers protection from the elements.
After finding a location that they believe is suitable for their colony, both types of bees will begin building their honeycomb from the top down.
Second step - building the comb
Worker bees prepare the hive by coating its walls with a thin layer of propolis. This substance is made from plant resins collected by the bees, wax secreted from glands in their abdomen, and their saliva. Bees use propolis to coat surfaces inside their hive at various stages of construction to help bind things together—hence the common name for bee glue.
Next, the bees will chew the wax they secrete until it is soft, binding pieces together to eventually form individual cells. These cells will be used to store nectar, pollen, water, honey, eggs, and larvae. As bees age, they produce a lower quality of wax—therefore, the bees responsible for building the comb are usually between two and three weeks old.
Once built, the hive will normally have only one entrance and will be occupied by the colony for several years. Unlike some other types of bees and wasps, bees do not build a new hive every year, instead creating a more robust structure that can be used for a longer period of time.
The walls of a finished honeycomb can support up to 30 times their own weight and will contain honey in their upper parts, pollen in the rows below, followed by worker brood cells, drone brood cells and finally queen cells at the bottom of the structure.
How do bees make their cells hexagonal?
The hexagonal shapes created during the beehive construction process have been a cause of debate in the scientific world since at least the 4th century AD when the Greek mathematician Pappus of Alexandria stated that bees had "a certain geometric foresight".
Some people believed that bees built cells of this shape because it allowed them to store the greatest amount of food while using the least amount of wax in their construction. Others argued that bees did build round cells, but that surface tension at the junctions where the cells met caused the circles to become hexagonal. In addition, there were also those who believed that the hexagonal shapes were the automatic result of each bee trying to make the cell it was working on as large as possible, with the edges of each cell pressing against the next.
In July 2013, a study led by engineer Bhushan Karihaloo of Cardiff University, UK, appeared to put an end to this dispute simply by using a smoker - but this work may have raised more questions than it provided answers.
A smoker is a portable device used by beekeepers to collect honey and other useful substances from hives. The smoke blown into and around the hive helps to keep bees away from important sections of the honeycomb. The smoke repels the bees and makes them more docile.
As part of the experiment, Karihaloo's team deliberately disturbed a bee colony by smoking them away from certain sections of the structure while they were building the comb. By doing this, they observed that the most recently built cells were circular, while those built slightly earlier were hexagonal.
This research revealed that the heat generated by the bees while they worked melted the comb wax, ultimately leading to the flattening of the cell walls and their hexagonal shape. This suggests that surface tension does indeed play a role in the development of the honeycomb's distinctive structure; however, it is not yet entirely clear whether the bees deliberately generate heat to melt the wax, or whether this occurs naturally and the hexagons are a result.
However, research has shown that bees measure the depth of each cell by crawling into it and determine the width of the comb walls using other parts of their bodies. They also seem to know when to change the angle of the cells to prevent honey from leaking out. With this instinctive skill at play, there is a strong possibility that bees do more to influence the shape of the cells in their comb than is currently apparent.
