To understand you need to think like a bee. Bees need a secure place for their entire colony to live. Similarly, there needs to be a place where their nectar can be stored and ripened suitably until it turns into hive. That means there is a need for space efficiency. A good solution is to build little storage units or cells just big enough for a bee to fit in which can also double as the containers in which nectar is stored. The bees’ very own honey jars. The next thing is to decide what the little cells should be made out of. Bees don’t have beaks or arms to pick up things but they are capable of producing wax. The thing is producing it is a lot of hard work. Bees have to consume 8 ounces of honey to produce just 1 ounce of wax. So they do not want to waste it. So they need a design that allows them to store the largest possible amount of honey, using the least amount of wax. What shape does that? Imagining for a minute that all bees had to attend architecture academy and go to math class.
Let’s say they asked their geometry teacher what shape would give us the most space to store our honey but require the least amount of wax? And the geometry teacher replied the shape that you are seeking is the circle leaving the bees to return to their trial construction site and begin building their honey comb using circular cells. After a while some of them might have noticed the problem with their design. Small gaps between the cells we cannot even fit in there. That is wasted space. So ignoring the geometry lessons and taking matters into their own hands, the bees went back to their drawing board to rethink their bee-hive design. One suggested triangles, another bee suggested squares finally a third bee piped up and said pentagons don’t seem to work but hexagons do. We want the one that uses the least amount of wax and be able to store the most amount of honey. That is the hexagon.
Trascripted By Benazir Elahee Munni