Why Bees Build Hexagons - instagram

Why Bees Never Build Square Honeycomb Bees pay for their honeycomb in wax, and wax is expensive. A bee has to eat roughly eight grams of honey to make one gram of it, so the shape of the comb is really an economics problem. Only three regular shapes tile a surface with no gaps: triangles, squares and hexagons. Rank them by how much wall they need per unit of storage and the hexagon wins at 3.722 against 4.000 for squares and 4.559 for triangles. That is about seven percent less wax than a square grid for the same area, repeated across tens of thousands of cells. The stronger claim, that the hexagon beats every possible partition rather than just the regular ones, is called the honeycomb conjecture. Varro wrote it down in 36 BC and Thomas Hales only proved it in 1999. #Shorts #math #bees #nature #geometry