The Honeycomb: the Physics Is Free
Nature · · 6 min read · By No Design Editorial
Bees do not know geometry, and admitting it costs nothing. The hexagon comes free from physics. Everything else the bee has to supply.
It is often said that bees know geometry, that they have somehow worked out the hexagon as the most efficient way to tile a plane. That claim should be given up, and giving it up costs nothing.
Wax cells begin closer to circular, and the hexagonal pattern emerges as soft wax flows and neighbouring cells press against each other under surface tension. Physics supplies the hexagon for free. Bubbles in a foam do the same thing and no one credits the foam with mathematics.
Now notice what physics does not supply, because this is the part the geometry claim was standing in front of.
The bee still has to provide wax glands that secrete building material on demand. Cells built to a consistent size across thousands of repetitions. Comb tilted upward by something like nine to fourteen degrees, so that uncapped honey, which is runny before it is dehydrated, does not simply pour out. Walls thinned to a precise fraction of a millimetre. And colony-wide temperature control that holds the wax at exactly the workability the process requires, since wax too cold will not flow and wax too warm will not hold its shape.
None of that falls out of surface tension. The tilt in particular is a functional requirement about the behaviour of a liquid, solved by insects that never see the problem stated. Give up the geometry and you find the builder, which was the better argument all along.
From Chapter 7: The Insect World.
Tags: Bees, Physics, Corrections, Quran