D3101: Scaling honeycomb: The blueprints of bee and wasps nests

The honeycomb nests of wasps and bees have been admired for their beauty and novel hexagonal structure by researchers and laypeople alike for centuries. Humans use hexagons in construction to provide strength using minimal material, and and bees and wasps have evolved hexagonal nests for the same reason, to conserve energy and materials in nest construction. It is not just the geometry of the hexagon that provides structural properties to these nests, but also individual cell parameters including cell diameter, cell wall thickness, and rounding in the corners of each hexagonal cell. There are two ways to increase the strength of hexagonal comb as the cell diameter increases: (1) increasing wall thickness, which increases weight and materials used, and (2) rounding the corner angles (measured as “corner radius”), which has been shown in honeybees to increase comb strength while conserving material. Thus, this infographic illustrates our hypotheses that as nest cells increase in diameter, we would see increases in corner radius and wall thickness, though we predict corner radius will more significantly conserve nest material. We also predict that investments in corner radius and wall thickness will be more important in nests constructed from wax and mud than for paper nests due to the materials’ strength and brittleness. Bees and wasps show economy of nest material use by using cell geometry rather than added material to increase strength, which offers applications for bio-inspired design and engineering.