Evidence that no liquid equilibrium process is involved in the comb building of honey bees (Apis Mellifera)
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According to Pirk et al. (2004), honeybees first build free standing cylindrical cells which are then transformed to hexagonal cross-section by wax-flow in a kind of self-organization. We show that there is no self-organization of the wax. Bees cannot form juxtaposed wax tubes which are in contact to each other. They would have to produce temperatures close to the melting point in order to accomplish flow of the wax in a time which is meaningfully short for honeycomb construction. The cells would collapse at this temperature. The form of the comb-cells adjacent to the walls of the nest cannot stem from circular tubes. From this it is clear that bees build their honeycomb in a direct and holistic way. They begin and continue building at the edge of the mid-wall. The combination of the following two principles inevitably generates the hexagonal cross-section of the cells: (1) the hexagonal close packing of the cells and (2) a common wall between all adjacent cells. This results in an economic use of space and material. The mid-wall can be considered as assembled of parts of Plateau s minimum plane of the regular tetrahedron and is built with minimum consumption of wax as are the cells.Verknüpfung zu Publikationen oder weiteren Datensätzen
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Erstpublikation in
Oberhessische naturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 67 (2017), 8 - 26