Perfect hexagonal structures inspired by honeycombs in bee nests are widely used to build everything from airplane wings, boats, and cars, to skis, sn

Engineers may learn from bees for optimal honeycomb designs | Cornell Chronicle

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2021-07-26 23:00:06

Perfect hexagonal structures inspired by honeycombs in bee nests are widely used to build everything from airplane wings, boats, and cars, to skis, snowboards, packaging and acoustic dampening materials.

Challenges arise when space constraints or repairs require engineers to keep a structure mechanically strong when linking together industrial honeycomb panels that each have cells of different sizes. High performance computers used with 3-D printers may solve this problem in the future, but could bees provide a more efficient and adaptable strategy?

A new study finds they can. It turns out that honey bees are skilled architects who plan ahead and create irregular-shaped cells and a variety of angles to bridge together uniform lattices when limited space constrains them.

Cells marked with different colors to show their orientations reveal how different patches in the comb are built with a consistent tilt when the bees merge two patches. Note that irregular five- and seven-sided cells are also used along the merge lines.