For this picture, biologists arranged honeycombs in a circle to create a pretty mandala. But the picture shouldn’t just look beautiful. A closer look reveals an exciting detail: two honeycombs arranged next to each other are constructed almost in mirror symmetry. They are honeycombs that previously faced each other in the bee nest.
This symmetry comes from the fact that honey bees always fill their honeycombs symmetrically: if they store honey in one cell of a honeycomb, they also do the same in the cell opposite. The same applies to the storage of pollen, brood and empty cells, as a research team led by Michael Smith from Auburn University has discovered.
However, in order to fill a cell “correctly”, the bees do not need to know what is in the opposite cell. Instead, the temperatures in the bee nest dictate how the honeycombs are organized. Because the right temperature is an essential factor for the good development of the brood, the bees fill their nests in such a way that a stable temperature profile results. The team discovered that symmetry helps.
Because two-sided, symmetrical nests maintain temperatures better than one-sided nests, more young bees hatch from them: In one experiment, the symmetrical honeycombs produced almost 60 percent more brood over a period of ten days than one-sided nests.