Multipurpose bees?

Good night fellas! Have you already become bee lovers?

This week I want to talk about one of the most characteristic aspects of bees … their hexagonal honeycomb. Almost everyone in the world has saw, at least on a picture or a cartoon, that mysterious and captivating hexagonal pattern. But why it would be that our lil’ workaholics are always building their homes with that particular architecture?

Each hexagonal cell is multipurpose: it goes from being a larvae nursery to the bee’s workshop or a honey and pollenn cupboard. And as our friends wanted to be deadly efficient, they decided to use …hexagons? Apparently this is nothing but a mathematical issue. Honeycomb’s cells extend all around and are placed one next to each other. As no empty spaces should be left, bees had to look for a cell shape that could “fit in”. By the matter of 360 degrees and that inner angles should be a divisor of this amount; the only polygons that are useful were equilateral triangles, squares and hexagons (360 is a multiple of 30, 90 and 120 … do the math!). Now, for economizing resources, bees had to use the polygon with the biggest area to fill and the lower relative perimeter to build with wax … that is hexagons!

Ooh la la! Bees turned out to be workers, administrators, mathematicians, architects, and not to mention modernist interior designers!

What other role you think bees might take? C’mon! I want to hear your opinion.

PS. What about my last week challenge?! Nobody got it :(