Why not square, triangle or circle?
In: 4542
The short answer is that they don’t. Bees have round bodies with wax producing glands along their abdomens. They secrete the wax to produce round, tubular cells. When those cells get forced together, they flatten out into hexagons because that is the most efficient arrangement. You could try it out yourself with poker chips or marbles or tuna cans. The important thing is that you have a bunch of circles that are the same size. If you try to pack them into a frame, maybe the bottom of a shoebox, they can be aligned in any pattern you like. You could pack them as a square grid, but if you press against the edges of the grid, you will force the circles to realign themselves in a tighter packing; they will fall into a hexagonal grid. That’s what bees do. They make circles and force them as close to each other as they can. That simple set of rules happens to produce a hexagonal grid
Latest Answers