Monday, August 5, 2024

Creation Moment 8/6/2024 - Why do bees use hexagons in honeycombs?

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. 
1 Corinthians 1:19

"Why
hexagons--- It’s a simple matter of geometry. If you want to pack together cells that are identical in shape and size so that they fill all of a flat plane, only three regular shapes (with all sides and angles
identical) will work: equilateral triangles, squares, and
hexagons
Of these, hexagonal cells require the least total length of wall, compared with triangles or squares of the same area. So it makes sense that bees would choose hexagons, since making wax costs them energy, and they will want to use up as little as possible—just as builders might want to save on the cost of bricks.

If you blow a layer of bubbles on the surface of water—a so-called “bubble raft”—the bubbles become
hexagonal, or almost so. You’ll never find a raft of square bubbles: If four bubble walls come together, they instantly rearrange into three-wall junctions with more or less equal angles of 120 degrees between them, like the center of the Mercedes-Benz symbol.

Evidently there are no agents shaping these rafts as
bees do with their combs. All that’s guiding the pattern are the laws of physics. Those
laws evidently have definite preferences, such as the bias toward three-way junctions of
bubble walls. The same is true of more complicated foams. If you pile up bubbles in three dimensions by blowing through a straw into a bowl of soapy water you’ll see that when bubble walls meet at a vertex, it’s always a four-way union with angles between the intersecting films roughly equal to about 109 degrees—an angle related to the four-faceted geometric tetrahedron.

Q: Like all of mathematics, the hexagons are all just a big accident, right?"
UncommonDescent