Someone brought me this cheeky little book. . .
We know that only honeybees make honeycombs, but it is the hexagon shape has fascinated mankind since some brave soul scooped the first honey from a hive! We see hexagons on everything from sneaker bottoms to teamwork seminar brochures and wall art to designer fabrics.
A friend recently dropped me this "colorful" little book, and I enjoyed Matt Kracht's mix of science, quips, playful illustrations, and sometimes irreverent humor in OMFG, Bees! He describes bees as "freakin' sorcerers of the insect world," and explains that honey has been harvested for thousands of years, as evidenced in cave paintings of prehistoric famers that date back as far as 9,000 years. Here are some excerpts from the chapter "Let's Talk About Hex" we found especially interesting:
"The honeycomb is one of the most studied cellular structures in the natural world because of its distinctive hexagonal construction. One could get extremely mathy about it, if one were inclined to show off their math prowess and were also unaware that no one besides another mathematician is ever entertained by that ***. But let's cut to the chase and just say that what is so fascinating about honeycomb is that it is built by bees and, while they could make any shape they want, it is invariably constructed of interlocking hexagons... But why not interlocking squares..or triangles, instead of the complicated six-sided polygon with all those 120-degree angles?"
"Enter Marcus Terentius Varro...In 36 BCE, Varro conjectured that using the hexagon would create the most compact and thus the most efficient honeycomb structure. This idea...is now called the "Honeycomb Conjecture." In 1999, only a little over 2000 years later, a University of Michigan mathematician named Thomas Hales put an end the the conjecture and proved that a regular hexagon grid or honeycomb is the best way to divide a surface into regions of equal area with the least total perimeter, and he proved that **** by using math."
So how do bees do it without a protractor?
"Workers (bees) begin chewing bits of wax until it becomes moldable, and then use their legs, mandibles, and even antennae to form a circular cell. This cell will be the circumference of their own thorax, and because all of the workers in the colony are the same size, the cells will be uniform...Honeybees maintain the temperature of the nest at 86 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, which just so happens to be the temperature at which beeswax is most malleable but not liquid."
"Because all of these circular tubes are built next to each other, the heat from all of those hot worker bees transforms the circular tubes into their iconic rounded hexagon shape via a process involving the flow of molten viscoelastic wax near the triple junction of the adjacent cells." Kracht describes it as "powerful bee magic' and we couldn't agree more!🐝❤️