Honey bees and social wasps reach convergent architectural solutions to nest-building problems.

ABSTRACT: The hexagonal cells built by honey bees and social wasps are an example of adaptive architecture; hexagons minimize material use, while maximizing storage space and structural stability. Hexagon building evolved independently in the bees and wasps, but in some species of both groups, the hexagonal cells are size dimorphic-small worker cells and large reproductive cells-which forces the builders to join differently sized hexagons together. This inherent tiling problem creates a unique opportunity to investigate how similar architectural challenges are solved across independent evolutionary origins. We investigated how 5 honey bee and 5 wasp species solved this problem by extracting per-cell metrics from 22,745 cells. Here, we show that all species used the same building techniques: intermed

SUBMITTER: Smith ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10374112 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature