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Have you ever noticed how frequently hexagons appear in nature? Or why the honeycomb cells that bees make have perfectly hexagonal prism shapes?
World Bee Day is celebrated internationally on May 20th each year. It is a chance to celebrate our precious pollinators and all the wonderful things they do for our ecosystem. This specific day was chosen to celebrate all things bees because Anton Janša, the pioneer of beekeeping, was born on the same day in 1734.
World Bee Day is important to us because all around the world bees are facing threats, including destruction of habitats, climate change, toxic pesticides and disease.
Bees, along with other pollinators, enable plants to reproduce, this helps globally with our food production. The hard-working winged invertebrates also help to provide habitats for other wildlife by pollinating many trees and flowers. They are, therefore, absolutely vital for the preservation of ecological balance and biodiversity on earth.
As part of the celebration, we are exploring the life of bees through CONNETIX tiles, especially focusing on why hexagons are the bestagons for the bees!
Bees are one of the most effective pollinators on the planet because they visit lots of flowers and plants, and carry more pollen between them than others. Bees also build their honeycombs with incredible efficiency, thanks to the amazing shape that is the hexagon.
The honeycombs produced by bees are demonstrations of precision engineering – an arrangement of prism-shaped cells with a hexagonal cross-section. Honeycombs are made from beeswax that is produced by worker bees. They produce wax from special glands in their body, which they then mix with some honey and pollen to produce the beeswax. The wax walls are made to a very precise thickness and the cells are slightly tilted from horizontal, engineered to prevent the runny honey from pouring out. The combs serve as not only storage for honey, but as chambers to raise young bees in as well.
By using hexagons bees can make very efficient use of space whilst using as little wax as possible. The hexagonal cells hold the maximum amount of honey, whilst ensuring no space is wasted, because the hexagons fit tight, and side by side together, in a compact arrangement.
This remarkable hexagonal structure has inspired mathematicians to study its properties and has even been used in architectural and engineering designs to optimize the use of space and provide structural stability. The hexagon is often considered a ‘strong’ shape as it distributes forces or weight evenly across its sides. This means that when you push or pull on a hexagon, the pressure/ force is spread out evenly compared to other shapes.
Hexagons are the most common shape that you will find in nature. These six-sided shapes are everywhere from columns of basalts from an old volcanic eruption, to snowflakes, Corals, crystals, and many more.
A hexagon is a polygon with six equal sides, six equal angles, and six vertices. The sum of its interior angles is 720°, with each interior angle measuring 120° and each exterior angle measuring 60°.
When it comes to stacking identical shapes on a flat plane to fill it entirely, only three regular shapes can achieve this: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons. Among these, hexagons require the least total length of wall compared to triangles or squares of the same area. This is because hexagons have the highest ratio of area to perimeter, making them the most efficient shape for minimizing material usage.
Therefore, it’s logical that bees use hexagonal cells in their hives, as producing wax requires energy, and bees aim to minimize the energy they use.
If we compare a triangle and a hexagon with the same perimeter, the hexagon will accommodate more triangles within its boundary. A hexagon with six equal sides, each having the same perimeter as the triangle, can contain six triangles inside it. This highlights the efficiency of the hexagon over the triangle when it comes to packing identical shapes within a given perimeter.
Bees are important pollinators. Pollination is the movement of pollen from the (male) anthers of a flower to the (female) stigma of the same or a different flower. Bees collect pollen from flowers, and pollen from the male reproductive organ of the flower sticks to the hairs of the bee’s body. When the bee travels to another flower, some pollen is rubbed off onto the female reproductive organ of the flower.
If you don’t have any hexagon tiles you can make them using other tiles. This is great way for children to gain greater understanding of composite shapes. You could use a combination of equilateral triangle, rhombus and trapezium to make a hexagon!
We hope these ideas have your creative juices flowing, giving you loads of ideas for what you can do with CONNETIX and learning around bees and hexagons.
Why not try some of these ideas in class or at home to celebrate World Bee Day:
Now that you have some cool examples of different ways to celebrate world bee day using CONNETIX tiles, it’s time to start playing! How will you be using CONNETIX tiles to celebrate? Get stuck into all the shape-shifting fun with CONNETIX and let your imagination bloom with endless possibilities!
If you have ideas for play and learning, we would love to hear about them! Share your creations and don’t forget to tag @connetix_tiles in your bee play .
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