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The hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells depends on the construction behavior of bees.

ABSTRACT: The hexagonal shape of the honey bee cells has attracted the attention of humans for centuries. It is now accepted that bees build cylindrical cells that later transform into hexagonal prisms through a process that it is still debated. The early explanations involving the geometers' skills of bees have been abandoned in favor of new hypotheses involving the action of physical forces, but recent data suggest that mechanical shaping by bees plays a role. However, the observed geometry can arise only if isodiametric cells are previously arranged in a way that each one is surrounded by six other similar cells; here I suggest that this is a consequence of the building program adopted by bees and propose a possible behavioral rule ultimately accounting for the hexagonal shape of bee cells.

SUBMITTER: Nazzi F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4913256 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells depends on the construction behavior of bees.

Nazzi Francesco F

Scientific reports 20160620

The hexagonal shape of the honey bee cells has attracted the attention of humans for centuries. It is now accepted that bees build cylindrical cells that later transform into hexagonal prisms through a process that it is still debated. The early explanations involving the geometers' skills of bees have been abandoned in favor of new hypotheses involving the action of physical forces, but recent data suggest that mechanical shaping by bees plays a role. However, the observed geometry can arise on ...[more]

PMID: 27320492

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Project description:Sleep appears to play an important role in the lives of honey bees, but to understand how and why, it is essential to accurately identify sleep, and to know when and where it occurs. Viewing normally obscured honey bees in their nests would be necessary to calculate the total quantity and quality of sleep and sleep's relevance to the health and dynamics of a honey bee and its colony. Western honey bees (Apis mellifera) spend much of their time inside cells, and are visible only by the tips of their abdomens when viewed through the walls of an observation hive, or on frames pulled from a typical beehive. Prior studies have suggested that honey bees spend some of their time inside cells resting or sleeping, with ventilatory movements of the abdomen serving as a telltale sign distinguishing sleep from other behaviors. Bouts of abdominal pulses broken by extended pauses (discontinuous ventilation) in an otherwise relatively immobile bee appears to indicate sleep. Can viewing the tips of abdomens consistently and predictably indicate what is happening with the rest of a bee's body when inserted deep inside a honeycomb cell? To distinguish a sleeping bee from a bee maintaining cells, eating, or heating developing brood, we used a miniature observation hive with slices of honeycomb turned in cross-section, and filmed the exposed cells with an infrared-sensitive video camera and a thermal camera. Thermal imaging helped us identify heating bees, but simply observing ventilatory movements, as well as larger motions of the posterior tip of a bee's abdomen was sufficient to noninvasively and predictably distinguish heating and sleeping inside comb cells. Neither behavior is associated with large motions of the abdomen, but heating demands continuous (vs. discontinuous) ventilatory pulsing. Among the four behaviors observed inside cells, sleeping constituted 16.9% of observations. Accuracy of identifying sleep when restricted to viewing only the tip of an abdomen was 86.6%, and heating was 73.0%. Monitoring abdominal movements of honey bees offers anyone with a view of honeycomb the ability to more fully monitor when and where behaviors of interest are exhibited in a bustling nest.

Dataset Information

The hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells depends on the construction behavior of bees.

Publications

The hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells depends on the construction behavior of bees.

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