Sugarbag Bees and their Amazing Spiral Honeycombs
Many of us in sleek industrial societies consider it a bit of a thrill to gnaw on a chunk of actual honeycomb. We are familiar with rectangular chunks of the hexagonal cells, but the sugarbag bees kick it up several notches.
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| Sugarbag bees doing regular bee stuff Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Graham Wise (CC BY 2.0) |
These bees (say that three times fast...don't you feel silly now?) build very intricate structures. Interestingly, they forego the familiar hexagonal shape and comb style used by their buzzy brethren. Some owlhoots riding for the Darwin brand decided that since their combs resemble crystals, it could all happen by chance without the need of the Master Engineer. (Which is a fallacious, invalid comparison in the first place.) Of course, since the narrative is more important than genuine research, this fake news easily falls apart under examination.
If you bee-hive yourself, you can read the rest at "How brilliant builder-bees create 3-D spiral honeycombs".Small, stingless bees of the species Tetragonula carbonaria, from Southeast Asia and Australia, are known to build nests with brood combs having the most ‘bee-autiful’, three-dimensional spiral shapes. These complex structures consist of four basic designs, stacked in 10–20 layers per nest: 1) bullseye-targets, 2) spirals, 3) double spirals, and 4) disordered terraces. Worker bees have been observed to construct new cells located at the edges of each expanding comb. The queen bee then lays an egg in each cell, which is provisioned with honey before it is closed, then the whole process is repeated. The results are some of the most complex designs for honeycombs known in the bee ‘kingdom’.