Honeybees are famous for their ability to build complex and flexible hives that vary in cell size. When bees build their nests inside tree cavities, they get used to working within the space available, which often leads to irregularly shaped hexagons and other patterns. To understand how bees adjust their building to fit different environments, we created 3D-printed frames with various constraints and studied how bees responded. Our research revealed that bees often form repeating patterns that can be explained and predicted using a computer model similar to how crystals form in nature. This model helps us understand how the larger, more irregular shapes in the honeycomb come from the bees’ interactions with their immediate surroundings.

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G. G. Fard, D. Zhang, F. López Jiménez, O. Peleg
Honeycomb crystallography: comb formation under geometric frustrations
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 119 (48) e2205043119 (2022) 

 

Despite the bees' known adaptability in building honeycombs, how they manage to construct them with such different cell sizes hasn't been studied much. To explore this, we combined our 3D-printing method with X-ray microscopy to measure how bees adapt their honeycombs to different starting conditions. We found that bees use three different strategies depending on the cell size: for smaller cells, they might combine a few cells together to make up for the limited space. For medium-sized cells (up to twice their usual size), they tilt or shift the cells. For the largest cells (three times the normal size), they stack the cells in layers. Our findings offer new insights into how honeybees build their hives and could have applications in fields like 3D printing, designing materials inspired by nature, and the study of insects.

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G. G. Fard, C. K. Prasanna, O. Peleg, F. López Jiménez
Adaptive Cell Size, Merging, Tilting, and Layering in Honeybee Comb Construction
Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.29.596484v1 (2024)