Why not square, triangle or circle?
In: 4542
It’s because hexagons are the bestagons and also because it’s the most efficient way to pack all those combs together
They don’t, they make them round and they naturally become haxagonal when they set since that’s the most optimal and strongest way of filling the space without collapsing.
You can see the same thing with soap bubbles on water. When lots of them get squeezed together on the surface the ones toward the middle become hexagonal.
Because hexagons are the bestagons! So says CGP Grey. Bees make circular tubes of wax, but physics squeezes them into hexagons as it is the best use of hive space.
Hexagon is bestagon.
Cgp grey from YouTube goes over the massive advantages of hexagons, but in short:
*Infinitely repeating pattern
*Most surface area for least material
* Made of triangles, which makes it awesome.
It’s the simplest shape that can stack and not cascade upon itself with virtually zero negative space.
It’s not that bees design hexagons, but that they stack recesses together that naturally form hexagons.
It is the most efficient use of space and is a very strong shape. They are also tilted 3° to the left to facilitate drainage. They are smart little fuckers!
Voronoi Relaxation / Lloyd’s algorithm (keyword to search on YouTube).
Explanation:
Imagine you are a bee and you are making a cell by putting wax around you. An other bee on the other side of the wall is also doing the same, and you are kind of pushing against both sides of the wall at the same time. The wall is made of wax and is malleable so you can squish it to make your cell bigger.
What happens if you are in a smaller cell than your neighbor? You can push against the walls around you more easily, and you have more strength than the opposite bee. So it naturally make the cell the same size.
But it also have an other effect, if you push in a corner, two bee push against you, so it pushes you away from that corner. In general, if you look at the bees when they are in the cells, they are in the center of those cells and pushing against all the walls in such a way that the area in each cell is the same as the neighboring cells. Cells with a tiny wall between them don’t push each other much, and will get closer to each other, increasing the common wall size. So it pushes all cells to have all walls the same size.
It turns out if you simulate this, you get a pretty interesting result: in a rectangle, the cells in the corner will become square, the cells in an edge will become pentagons and the cells in the middle will become hexagons. All will have the same area and because most of the cells are not in a corner or an edge, they are almost all hexagons.
Keeping it simple, it’s actually because they make a bunch of round shapes but when you pack round things together they pack into the lowest energy state which is a hexagon on a 2d plane.
Fun fact though that other comments have missed though. Bee honeycombs aren’t actually Hexagons, they are Rhombic Dodecahedrons, a remarkably stable 12 sides shape that looks like a hexagon when cut in half. It is the shape that spheres fall into when pressed together. It’s my favorite shape also.
They create circle honeycombs and the act of putting honey in there forces the walls against the other honeycomb walls, equally, and makes it into a hexagon
Long story short, packing circles at a maximum density leads to things that look like hexagons. So it is because the bees are packing circles as densely as they can.
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