In a world of smooth hexagonal honeycombs, a small group of Australian rebels bees You have chosen to build spiral staircases.
Meet the bees of the genus Tetragonula. These Australian pollinators do not have stingers, but compensate for their defensive deficiencies by building fascinating wax fortresses whose beauty has Internet captivated for a long time.
These spiral structures are actually giant, whirling nests called “brood combs.” Each small circular cell is an egg chamber, built by a worker bee that secretes wax, provided with food regurgitated by a nurse bee, and then the queen fills it with an egg. When one cell is finished, workers move on to the next, building outward and upward in a spiral pattern that can sometimes reach 20 stories tall, Tim Heard, entomologist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization ( CSIRO) in Australia, previously I told Live Science.
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Then how Tetragonula bees become the Frank Lloyd Wright of the insect world? Does each colony employ its own master architect, charged with guiding the construction of its comb, or does each worker simply follow an unconscious set of individually coded building rules? According to a study published today (July 22) in the Royal Society interface magazine, the answer could be in crystals.
“These combs follow the same basic rules that make crystals grow in a spiral pattern,” study co-author Julyan Cartwright, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) who studies mathematical patterns at nature. “Every bee is basically following an algorithm.”
Buzzed in nature
Cartwright saw a viral image of the infamous brood combs a few years ago and immediately recognized the pattern; at the time, he was studying mother-of-pearl molluscs, whose iridescent shells also reveal different spiral structures when you see under an electron microscope.
Both cases of animal architecture recalled research from the 1950s that explained how crystals grow naturally in a spiral structure by following some simple mathematical rules, Cartwright said. He and his colleagues wanted to find out what those rules might be for Tetragonula bees.
“What kind of minimal information would a bee have that would lead it to produce these patterns?” Cartwright said.
To investigate, the researchers modeled the construction of a spiral comb using an algorithm inspired by crystal growth. Each simulation started with a single brood cell. One by one, digital worker bees added new cells to the comb by following one of two simple rules: bees could add a cell to the growth front, the edge of the comb where other bees had been placing cells, whenever their new cell was placed. a little higher than its neighbors; Or, bees could build a new cell on top of an existing cell, provided that cell was more or less level with its neighboring cells.
With these restrictions, each new level of the comb had to be built a good distance from the edge, giving each new level a smaller radius than the previous one. The higher a level, the lower its radius. And so, with just these few simple rules, the spiral pattern emerged.
According to Cartwright, the ease with which his computer was able to recreate TetragonulaSpiral combs show that bees don’t follow a blueprint, but simply respond to their local environment according to a few biological rules coded in their behavior long ago.
“When humans build a structure like a building, we have an architect who makes a plan and then the builders follow it,” said Cartwright. “What we discovered is that bees don’t need a plan. They just come up with a simple set of rules about where to put a new piece of wax when it hits the comb. And if you program those rules on a computer, they produce the same images.” .
What exactly are those rules? Until we can personally ask the bees, there is probably no way to know for sure, the researchers wrote. It’s good that they don’t have a sting.
Originally published in Live Science.
