Weekend field trips on the Web

Des Emery, St. Thomas, ON, Canada — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:45:05 GMT

Hi, Alan - the pictures of that 'magical substance' or royal jelly also shows that honeycomb 'hexagonal' cells are sometimes 'round.'

Actually, examining the honeycomb's structure shows that the worker bee, in building each cell, deposits the wax by turning in a circle, the diameter determined by the length of the bee's body. The compression resulting from adjacent cell construction along with the heat within the hive makes the wax pliable enough to then form hexagon shapes.

Any circle, surrounded by similarly-sized circles, will automatically form the hexagon shape. The honeybee's geometry is just another one of nature's responses to its own reality.