Bees can accomplish amazing feats. They are able to not only recall the locations of good food sources but also communicate this information with their peers. They care for the young of their hive and organize attacks on intruders.They are also brilliant builders. Nearly every honeycomb in the hive is a perfect hexagon with each side being exactly the same length. This is despite bees having to create hexagons of different sizes for drone workers and workers, and often merging honeycombs from opposite walls of the hive. These complex bees are managed by how they do it.The automated image-analysis system used in this paper was used to identify different ways bees handle these transitions. Researchers who created the system discovered that bees can see potential problems in advance and make smaller adjustments to help prevent larger changes.Regular attendance is key.Honeybees are the ones in question, but many other species also create hexagonal structures. Honeybees have a habit of creating hexagonal arrays since the fifth century CE. More recent measurements show that most honeybees are very similar in their hexagonal patterns. Each side is typically very close in length to each other.This is despite many major obstacles. First, there are multiple workers involved in the construction of each honeycomb. This means that the regularity of the constructions cannot be explained simply by one worker engaging in instinctual movements. Nests require two different sizes of honeycombs because they have distinct sizes for workers (mostly the nest) as well as drones (males that are used for reproduction). Honeycombs can be built in multiple units. They are usually constructed from several areas of the hive, and then meet at the middle.A Cornell computer scientist, Kirstin Petersen and Nils Napp, both animal behavior specialists, met up to discuss how these issues were managed. They work together on invert-like robots. They combined their image-analysis software to identify cell boundaries and calculate basic statistics such as the number of sides, length, etc. They could then be classified according to whether the cells were large enough for drones or workers, or if there was something else about them.AdvertisementTransitions, ordered and unorganizedThe most important offspring were the ones that had the largest number of cells in the comb. This means that workers are usually smaller. However, workers would begin to build larger cells before the drones were invented. This allowed for a smooth transition. The transition was easy and only took a few cells to accomplish. It also covered an area smaller than the reach of workers' legs.It was much more difficult to manage the merger of different honeycombs. Cells with unusually many sides were required to manage the merger of different honeycombs. Instead of the usual hexagon, cells were identified by image-recognition systems with four to nine walls. They were very rare and accounted for less than 5% of honeycomb cells. They were usually found at the edges of the honeycomb, or in discrete stripes when two combs were combined.The bees made six-sided cells even though it was impossible. However, 93 percent were five- or seven-sided. The borders between cells with five or seven sides were more common than those between two cells of the same size, whether they were five-sided or seven-sided.These odd-sided cells are necessary because bees will build honeycombs at different locations, which can lead to different orientations. As these segments meet, the hexagonal arrays of bees will become incompatible. Nonhexagonal cells are more common the larger the angle. In extreme cases, more than half of the cells that lie along the line where honeycombs join have more than six sides.However, bees see the problem coming and start to twist the hexagons so that the honeycombs can meet.Is this cognitionResearchers summarized what they saw in a very concise manner.They wrote that the bees effectively "roll" hexagonal cells into the gaps when merging combs. These rolling cells can keep their hexagonal shape if the tilt difference between the two cells is small. However, if the tilt difference between the two cells is large, the bees will use nonhexagonal shapes for merging the combs. All of this is on top of the complexity involved in managing two different sizes cells.According to the authors, all of this suggests that the comb-building process doesn't just happen instinctually. They believe there must be "cognitive processes" involved with the construction. The brain of the bee is very different from what we are familiar with (the closest we know is Drosophila, a fruit fly). It is therefore difficult to imagine what these processes might look like.PNAS, 2021. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103605118 (About DOIs).
