Abstract
The absolute perfection with which honeybees construct their hexagonal comb cells has astonished human beings since ancient times. The deep mystery is not why hexagons, but how such a perfect geometrical shape is fabricated, without any geometrical portrait or tools. Do they possess divine intelligence? Recent studies shed light on this revered mystery and show beyond doubt that it is the thermo-mechanical properties of beeswax and the knitting mechanism of bees that remould fresh circular cells into rounded hexagonal shape. How does this remoulding happen? In this article, we describe the inner mechanism involved in such spontaneous transformation of shapes, and explore the hidden mystery behind honeybee’s architecture.
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The present article is published as a requirement of scientific social responsibility policy under the MATRICS scheme, granted by Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Govt. of India (Grant No. MTR/2019/000044).
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Kishore Dutta is working in the Department of Physics, Handique Girls’ College, Guwahati. His research interests include nonlinear dynamics, critical phenomena in strongly correlated magnetic systems, quantitative social sciences, to name a few.
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Dutta, K. Natural Hexagons. Reson 26, 399–413 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-021-1138-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-021-1138-8