Bees and Wasps

Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, and are known for their role in pollination and for producing honey and beeswax. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea, presently classified by the unranked taxon name Anthophila. There are nearly 20,000 known species of bees in seven to nine recognized families, though many are undescribed and the actual number is probably higher. They are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. Bees are adapted for feeding on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients.

Bees figure prominently in mythology and folklore and have been used by political theorists as a model for human society. Journalist Bee Wilson states that the image of a community of honey bees “occurs from ancient to modern times, in Aristotle and Plato; in Virgil and Seneca; in Erasmus and Shakespeare; Tolstoy, as well as by social theorists Bernard Mandeville and Karl Marx.” They are found in heraldry where they can signify industriousness as in the Manchester bee in the crest of Manchester City Council.

“In nature, bees have to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimises travel distance, and then reliably find their way home – not a trivial feat if you have a brain the size of a pinhead! Indeed such travelling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving.”

Our lifestyle relies on networks such as traffic on the roads, information flow on the web and business supply chains. By understanding how bees can solve their problem with such a tiny brain we can improve our management of these everyday networks without needing lots of computer time.
Hexagonal cells

“The hexagonal cells of bees and wasps create an extraordinarily strong space-frame, in particular in the vertical bee comb with two cell layers back to back with half a cell’s shift in the position to create a three-dimensional pyramidal structure. The extraordinary strength is exemplified by a comb 37 centimetres by 22.5 centimetres in size, which is made of 40 grams of wax but can contain about 1.8 kilograms of honey.”

“A bees’ honeycomb is one of the wonders of the world. Layer upon layer of hexagonal cells of identical size and shape are stacked together as precisely as if the bees had worked to a grid drawn on graph paper. But why should bees build hexagonal cells? Why should they not be square, like boxes, or circular?…As we have already noted, natural organization is economical, expending the least amount of energy and using the least material necessary for a task…Three-way junctions of 120° angles occur quite widely in nature, being the most economical angle for joining things together.”

Drone bees start building from the top of the hive down, with wax that they secrete to form cells. Each time they finish a cell, they fill it with honey or larvae and seal it off with wax. It’s possible that the hexagon shape we see in honeycombs is actually a design accident, since the cells start off circular and become hexagons once they’re pressed equally from all sides.

This finding feeds into a long-standing debate about whether the honeycomb is an example of exquisite biological engineering or blind physics. A regular geometric array of identical cells with simple polygonal cross sections can take only one of three forms: triangular, square or hexagonal. Of these, hexagons divide up the space using the smallest wall area, and thus, for a honeycomb, the least wax. This economy was noted in the fourth century ad by the mathematician Pappus of Alexandria, who contended that the bees had “a certain geometrical forethought”. But in the seventeenth century, the Danish mathematician Erasmus Bartholin suggested that the insects need no such forethought. He said that hexagons would result automatically from the pressure of each bee trying to make its cell as large as possible, much as the pressure of bubbles packed in a single layer creates a hexagonal foam.

“Honeycomb contains structural advantages and energy efficiencies that humans have yet to improve upon.” – Janine Benyus, Biometric Scientist

While bees use wax to build hives, people have mimicked honeycombs using everything from plastics to metal. The honeycomb pattern is widely used in aerospace engineering, and it’s often repeated in all types of product and building design.

Sinosteel International Plaza is a new, organic, honeycomb icon for the redeveloped city of Tianjin. The Chinese central government has chosen Tianjin, a port city one hour east of Beijing, to become the new economic hub of Northern China. Binhai New District will be the centre of this hub. This new central business disctrict will be created from scratch over the next five years. Sino Steel commissioned MAD to create a landmark for this new central business district. They specified two towers: an office tower (358 metres) and a smaller hotel (88 metres).

We wanted to move away from the usual image of the central business district: rows and rows of glass and steel boxes. Our design is natural, organic and futuristic. Our key concept is the honeycomb façade. The façade is made up of five different sizes of hexagonal windows, a traditional element in Chinese architecture. These windows flow across the building in an irregular, naturally occurring pattern: like cells multiplying. This pattern gives life to the building, changing the way it looks from different perspectives. The towers rise from a green ‘hill’, which functions as the hotel’s podium, a further contrast against the hard surfaces in the rest of the Binhai New District. The honeycombs’s final contribution is to ensure the building will be energy efficient. Although the pattern at first appears to be random, it actually responds to patterns of sun and wind on the building. By mapping the different air flows and solar direction across the site, we were able to position different sized windows accordingly, minimizing heat loss in the winter and heat gain in the summer.