ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Imperfect comb construction reveals the architectural abilities of honeybees.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Honeycomb construction on designed foundations reveals geometry-dependent developmental pathways.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- What a royal bedchamber provides the queen bee.Nature · 2026Article
- Honeybee adaptability to square comb foundation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Honeybee comb geometry emerges from local redistribution of angular space by worker construction activity.npj entomology · 2026Article
- Machine-Assisted Inverse Design of Patchy Particles for Self-Assembly of Archimedean Tilings.ACS nano · 2025Article
- Honeybees adapt to a range of comb cell sizes by merging, tilting, and layering their construction.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Design of nondeterministic architected structures via bioinspired distributed agents.Science advances · 2025Article
- Morphological Comparisons of Adult Worker Bees Developed in Chinese and Italian Honey Bee Combs.Insects · 2025Article
- The potential importance of the built-environment microbiome and its impact on human health.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The Effect of Comb Cell Size on the Development ofLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Sub-cell scale features govern the placement of new cells by honeybees during comb construction.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Article
- The role of cognition in nesting.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- A simple mechanism for collective decision-making in the absence of payoff information.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Honey bees and social wasps reach convergent architectural solutions to nest-building problems.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Manipulating nest architecture reveals three-dimensional building strategies and colony resilience in honeybees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Ontogeny of collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- On the Role of Theory and Modeling in Neuroscience.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Crystallography of honeycomb formation under geometric frustration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A distributed nanocluster based multi-agent evolutionary network.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Ordering and topological defects in social wasps' nests.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Honeybees are renowned for their perfectly hexagonal honeycomb, hailed as the pinnacle of biological architecture for its ability to maximize storage area while minimizing building material. However, in natural nests, workers must regularly transition between different cell sizes, merge inconsistent combs, and optimize construction in constrained geometries. These spatial obstacles pose challenges to workers building perfect hexagons, but it is unknown to what extent workers act as architects versus simple automatons during these irregular building scenarios. Using automated image analysis to extract the irregularities in natural comb building, we show that some building configurations are more difficult for the bees than others, and that workers overcome these challenges using a combination of building techniques, such as: intermediate-sized cells, regular motifs of irregular shapes, and gradual modifications of cell tilt. Remarkably, by anticipating these building challenges, workers achieve high-quality merges using limited local sensing, on par with analytical models that require global optimization. Unlike automatons building perfectly replicated hexagons, these building irregularities showcase the active role that workers take in shaping their nest and the true architectural abilities of honeybees.
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