How honeybees construct the right hive from tricky foundations

Honeybees are one of the hardest-working creatures on this planet. But there is much more to them than what meets the eye. They are also maestros when it comes to construction and design. They can probably teach a thing or two to humans, because they are capable of building intricate hives that serve as food storage, nurseries, and safe shelters for their colonies.A new study has delved into the numerous ways honeybees build their hives, depending on their needs. The findings of the study are published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.The new study, led by Golnar Gharooni-Fard of the University of Colorado Boulder, USA, and colleagues, found that merging, tilting, and layering honeycombs allow bees to adapt to available space.Honeybees have an exceptional ability to construct hives where they can store their food and raise their larvae. The construction process, like many other activities, is a collaborative effort of thousands of hard-working bees. “Building a hive is a beautiful example of honeybees solving a problem collectively. Each bee has a little bit of wax, and each bee knows where to deposit it, but we know very little about how they make these decisions,” Orit Peleg, associate professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Computer Science, said in a statement. Their construction pattern also demonstrates a knack for adjusting their honeycomb structures to account for available space and resources. The new study explored how they adopt certain strategies to adapt to different building conditions.To understand the honeybees' construction pattern, the researchers presented colonies with 3D-printed plastic honeycomb foundations of different sizes. Using X-ray microscopy, they were able to track how the bees responded to these unusual starting conditions.What they found was striking. The bees didn’t give up when they were presented with unusual foundations. When the foundations were too small, the bees merged multiple cells to create overlying spaces of adequate size. When they were given large foundation cells, the bees built their honeycombs with slanted borders. This shrank the cell opening, while keeping the storage depth intact. In circumstances where the foundation cells were extra large, the bees simply built a new layer of regular-sized honeycombs on top, using the borders of the plastic foundation as support.These findings stress how honeybees do not follow a fixed blueprint to construct their hives, but instead adapt to the conditions they are presented with. These findings explore the complex behaviour of bees, and also promise clues for the design of bio-inspired engineering systems.“We have provided bees with 3D printed panels with a hexagonal pattern already imprinted, but with a size different of that preferred by the bees. We have found that they use at least three different techniques to adapt these foundations to a pattern more suitable to their needs, including complex three-dimensional arrangements,” corresponding author Francisco López Jiménez said. “These tiny builders seem to have an intuitive understanding of the physics behind collective construction. We're just beginning to understand the rich set of strategies they use - tilting, merging, layering - to shape structures that meet their needs in remarkably adaptable ways,” Peleg said. “It is striking that the patterns that bees used to adapt to constraints due to irregular geometries are similar to those in very different systems. These include the cracks that appear in mud as it dries off, or the patterns in graphene and other atomic crystals,” López Jiménez added.