how the honey bees able to find their comb?
Answers
Answer:
The bees chew and chew, mixing enzymes from their saliva and softening the wax flakes until it is formable like clay. The bees then add the wax to the comb, continuing the hexagonal shape. In nature, bees will create “U” shaped comb hanging in flat disks.
Explanation:
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Answer:
Using details from Huber and others, we know that the procedure for building the combs commences when worker bees form a curtain or “festoon,” either by clinging to the top of the cavity in which they find themselves, or the underside of a wooden bar provided by a beekeeper, or else the lower edge of a previously constructed comb. Each row of bees clings tightly to the one above and they face each other, with the aim of building a two sided comb between themselves. Once the comb is commenced they can hang on it. Wax producing bees engorge with honey and the wax forms in glands in their abdomen. The pure beeswax appears in the form of a “scale” or flake, which they take up with their mandibles and begin to chew it like a piece of gum, adding saliva.
This is the very point at which we can see if the bees make cylinders which then morph themselves spontaneously into prisms. The first shapes to appear are all flat, thin supports built down from the top and are inflected at precisely the correct angles from the very start. It looks as if the bees are working from some sort of a blueprint which contains the shapes, angles and distances. But soon it becomes apparent from close observation that no individual bee works for long on the project. They move here and there, starting some work and continuing that started by others. It seems clear that they simply assess the situation in progress, continue as appropriate, and scurry off.
Blueprint or Stigmergy?
The concept of stigmergy was developed by French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé about 1959. This idea proposes that there is not a blueprint or overall design at all. It proposes that each bee works independently, responding with a set of reflexive rules which are a sort of “if this, then this” procedure. Computer programmers used the acronym IFTTT; they create branching sequences of procedures that follow one after the other creating an emergent result based on the variable input.
This model can account for why the comb can be constructed in such consistently repeated symmetry when the space is unobstructed, such as inside the wall of a house. Bees can construct combs many feet tall or wide that are perfectly flat and made up of unbroken swaths of hexagons. However, as the need arises, they can change the direction of the comb, winding it to fit irregular spaces, around obstructions, etc. They have the capacity to improvise as needed and to create novel and unexpected shapes and solutions. They do not proceed mechanistically and blindly like a train on the rails, but adjust themselves to whatever space they have occupied.
Stigmergy further supposes that honey bees are not really coöperating in the way that people tend to romanticize that they do. It suggests that each bees is working independently, not really cognizant of the whole structure, or “purpose” of the hive. The great form that we see and admire is the result of thousands of workers proceeding independently, guided by behaviors that have led to success in the past, and have been preserved through time by evolution, which tends to keep successful adaptations while sacrificing those creatures which fail to adapt. Oldroyd and Pratt describe it like this:
Close observation of honey bees shows that each cell emerges from small contributions by many workers rapidly coming and going at the building site. Stigmergy allows any worker to pick up where the last one left off, as long as every worker follows the same rules (Oldroyd, 2015).
Darwin’s Conundrum
Charles Darwin took many years to construct his theory of evolution by natural selection. During this time he challenged himself by looking beyond the apparent results that evolution had produced, to the obstacles his theory would have to overcome to be fully explanatory. One of these was the honeycomb, which had always been seen as an example of the expression of God’s plan by His creatures.
Not only did Darwin intend to challenge this firmly entrenched system of beliefs, but he needed to supplant it with a new system in which people could believe, if it offered a sufficiently strong explanation. In his own words, “I am half mad on the subject to try to make out some simple steps from which all the wondrous angles may result.” According to Sarah Davis:
In the Origin, Darwin wanted to show that simple, repeated actions, such as the excavation of excess wax, could result in complicated structures. This is a lesson that applied not only to honey bees, but also to other creatures’ structures, such as spiders’ webs, birds’ nests and beavers’ dams. The message from Darwin was that instinct could result in seemingly intelligent actions and behaviour, despite the animal not actually reasoning about what it is doing (Davis, 2004).
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