Bees are intelligent little creatures with a constant need to secure a place for their entire colony to live in.
Honey needs a lot of processing from bees so they had to find the perfect solution to store it.
What comes next is an elegant example of evolution and genius.
Building materials
Honey bees are perfectly adapted as builders.
In their 3rd day of life, they start to produce wax and actively help their colony to grow.
Resinous mixtures are gathered from trees that are used by bees to make propolis as a sealant for unwanted open spaces formed accidentally inside the hive.
Wax is the main building material possessed by bees. The problem with it is that producing it requires a lot of hard work. Bees have to consume almost 4kg of honey to produce just 500g of it.
Brilliant mathematicians
Honey bees are in fact, excellent mathematicians.
Scientists claim that honey bees can calculate angles and can even comprehend the roundness of the Earth.
Honey bees are the only invertebrates known to mankind that can understand the concept of zero, a concept that took humans millennia to comprehend.
Nature’s finest designers
The hive is not just a roof above honey bees head but doubles as a place to store their honey.
Natural fortresses, hives are central to honey bee survival and their architectural design must be flawless.
Of all the possible design patterns, honey bees chose hexagons.
Why hexagons?
If you take a look inside any hive you will see that it’s constructed from tightly packed hexagons.
To understand why, you need to think like a bee. First, you need a place to sleep and eat. Similarly, there needs to be a place where you can store your colony nectar until it turns into honey.
Bee brood is an essential part of the honey bees life cycle so there needs to be a perfect place for eggs to develop into adults.
So bees had to find a design that allows them to store the largest possible amount of honey and brood while using the least amount of wax.
To find out which shape fits best to their needs, honey bees being nature’s little architects calculated the areas of the square, the triangle, and the hexagon and discovered that the hexagon was in fact the shape that gave them the most storage space.
After agreeing on an ideal size, they started building their little fortresses which any architect would have been proud to design.
