Natural Order

Sarah Lynas

Bees construct their honey comb of multiple hexagonal prisms with trihedral angles at one end; these cells are built to conserve the amount of wax used. Bees produce wax by consuming honey and then secreting wax through special glands on a worker bee’s abdomen, these wax flakes are then chewed by the bee and used to build honeycomb cells. By optimizing the surface area equation of the cells the ideal measure of the trihedral angle that will minimize the surface are and consequently the wax used to make the cell. By measuring the apex angle of 30 cells the accuracy of the optimization prediction of 55 degrees can be evaluated. Plaster molds of honey comb cells are used to measure the trihedral angles. A standard deviation of 1.402 and a 99% confidence rating of the collected data support the hypothesis that bees minimize the amount of wax used in honeycomb construction. This data illustrates the complex organization of beehives and natural engineering phenomenon. The relationship between the volume of wax used in constructing honeycomb cells and the volume of honey held by the cells with respect to varying measurements of the trihedral angle would be interesting to study in the future.