Bees build their home out of wax
(beeswax!). Unlike wasps, who collect
the material to make their home, bees create the wax themselves. Underneath the worker bee abdomen there are 4
pairs of glands. The bee body, like all
insects is made of a hard material. So
that the bee can flex its body, this ‘exoskeleton’ is made up of a number of
hard overlapping plates, joined by flexible membranes. The wax glands are hidden in the overlapping
area between two of these plates, so that the wax appears as a small flake between
the plates.
The bees have to warm themselves up to be
able to make and work with wax, because soft beeswax is easier to manipulate. They also have to eat lots of honey to be
able to produce wax.
When they have a flake ready to use, using
the stiff bristles on their back leg to hold the wax, they move the flake of
wax to their mouth. This does not always
work as well as intended, and the bottom of beehives usually has wax flakes on
it, where the bees have dropped a flake!
They don’t seem to bother to pick up dropped flakes, they just create
another.
Once the flake is in the bee’s mouth, they
chew it to soften it, and possibly add some more chemicals to it. Then the bee goes to add it to the comb that
they are building.
There is no foreman, each individual bee
just add more wax where they think that it should go. To build the perfect hexagonal cell, they
first build three rhombuses for the base, because three rhombuses provide a
hexagon for the cell walls of one side and a central seam for the cells on the
opposite side of the cell.
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| The three rhombuses that bees build at the base of a wax cell |
Next the bees start building up the side
walls on both sides (ie towards us and away from us in this diagram. When the walls have started to be built, the
bees will then start building more rhombuses to make the base of another cell,
and so on.
The bees make cells that are exactly 5.2mm
wide for the queen to lay eggs in to make more worker bees (girls). They create a slightly bigger cell for drone
bees to grow in (boy bees are bigger!)
The cell walls are 0.073mm thick to a
tolerance of +/- 0.002mm. If a human was
the same size as a bee that would mean making wax cells with walls 10mm thick
to a tolerance of +/- 0.25mm. Do you
think you could build something that accurate, with no rulers or tools, out of
a soft material using only your mouth and legs?
One trick that the bees use to ‘feel’ the
thickness of the wax is to press it gently with their head. Their antennae touch the wax at the same time
and they can feel how much the wax moves, and so how thick it must be.
