bees are a good example of evolution.
am sure back in time, there were bees that made honeycombs in the shape of a square or an equilateral triangle or any other shape.
why arent honeycombs some other shape? say, circular?
Well lets say you had to fill up some empty area with a repeating pattern so that everything in your area had to be within the patterns, not in the gaps.
With circles, you end up with a lot of gaps, so that isnt very useful, am sure it was tried, before mother nature shot it down, or rather eliminated the bees that built this way.
the three simplest shapes that work are a square, an equilateral triangle and a hexagon.
agreed that the square and the equilateral triangle are more simple, so why hexagons?
keep in mind that bees have to build walls so it's best to build stuff that can give a large amount of volume per area of the wall that they need to build. now if you ignore the depth of a honeycomb, this is merely the ratio of the area to the perimeter. You want this ratio to be as high as possible to get the most storage space for the amount of effort and material you put into the walls.
A square, the area to perimeter ratio is a quarter of the main dimension, the side.
For an equilateral triangle its the square root of 3 multiplied by a quarter of the side. that makes it better than a square.
ok, what about a hexagon then? for a hexagon, the area covered is 6 times the area of an equilateral triangle with the same side length, but the perimeter is merely twice, so this gives a high Area to Perimeter ratio.
i hope you arent thinking that this makes bees smart, because it really doesnt. bees are as mindless as humans when thinkin about how they fit in the big picture.
we are smart to some extent because by making an attempt to understand why bees build honeycombs the way they do, we are a wee bit closer to acknowledging that there is a big picture.
i am not entertaining hopes of us being able to understand the big picture anytime soon, miracles just dont happen, am not even ready yet....
am sure back in time, there were bees that made honeycombs in the shape of a square or an equilateral triangle or any other shape.
why arent honeycombs some other shape? say, circular?
Well lets say you had to fill up some empty area with a repeating pattern so that everything in your area had to be within the patterns, not in the gaps.
With circles, you end up with a lot of gaps, so that isnt very useful, am sure it was tried, before mother nature shot it down, or rather eliminated the bees that built this way.
the three simplest shapes that work are a square, an equilateral triangle and a hexagon.
agreed that the square and the equilateral triangle are more simple, so why hexagons?
keep in mind that bees have to build walls so it's best to build stuff that can give a large amount of volume per area of the wall that they need to build. now if you ignore the depth of a honeycomb, this is merely the ratio of the area to the perimeter. You want this ratio to be as high as possible to get the most storage space for the amount of effort and material you put into the walls.
A square, the area to perimeter ratio is a quarter of the main dimension, the side.
For an equilateral triangle its the square root of 3 multiplied by a quarter of the side. that makes it better than a square.
ok, what about a hexagon then? for a hexagon, the area covered is 6 times the area of an equilateral triangle with the same side length, but the perimeter is merely twice, so this gives a high Area to Perimeter ratio.
i hope you arent thinking that this makes bees smart, because it really doesnt. bees are as mindless as humans when thinkin about how they fit in the big picture.
we are smart to some extent because by making an attempt to understand why bees build honeycombs the way they do, we are a wee bit closer to acknowledging that there is a big picture.
i am not entertaining hopes of us being able to understand the big picture anytime soon, miracles just dont happen, am not even ready yet....
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