
A Spiraling Bees’ Nest - bookofjoe
https://www.livescience.com/61492-spiral-bee-hive-australian-stingless-bee.html
======
drhurdle
This reminded me of a video I had seen a while back by ViHart about spirals
and nature.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0)

Although her target audience is probably a bit younger than the people here, I
still thought someone may find it interesting, especially if they hadn't
thought about it much.

Edit: Also, if you have kids interested in math and these kinds of things,
they may be interested in some of the other videos on her channel. She has a
interesting way of presenting ideas on a few topics.

------
taneq
Spirals are one of those things that looks purposeful but is really easy to
construct using a few simple emergent rules.

"Make new honeycomb cells at the edge of the honeycomb."

"Don't get more than 10 cells from the old honeycomb."

There you go, a 10-cell-wide spiral.

~~~
zodPod
Without a rule about altitude changes or something how would you get a spiral
from this rather than just a circle?

~~~
tritium
So that rule can implicit as well: avoid collision with the existing comb
floor by ramping either up on top of it, or down underneath. The spiral
staircase structure starts to appear as soon as you encircle the axis and
choose a vertical direction to continue with. With each orbit, the structure
becomes more obvious.

I don’t think there was any intention of trying to describe a comprehensive
rule set in this thread.

~~~
zodPod
I agree I was just trying to understand it further. I've always thought the
idea of modeling the world was really interesting but it's always been a tad
abstract to me so I was trying to get a little insight into it.

------
tw1010
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems
pointless." \- Steven Weinberg.

Part of feels like, so what? If we figured out a mathematical model that
described the phenomenon, what then?

~~~
jameskilton
That's kind of the whole point of science. We can't know "what then" until we
understand why.

~~~
adrianN
Science doesn't really answer "why". It only provides models that allow us to
predict, more or less accurately, a future state of some system based on the
current state.

------
zzedd
Tim Heard is a dedicated and personable ex-scientist who now makes and
distributes Australian native bee hives. I have a couple in my backyard and
appreciate the spiral nests when I split the hive each year.
[http://www.sugarbag.net](http://www.sugarbag.net)

~~~
girvo
Oh man thank you so much for this link. I’ve wanted to keep a native bee hive
for ages, and he’s down in West End! Just down the road :)

------
ninju
Do they 'spiral' in different directions depending which side of the equator
they are on?

------
k_sze
The Apocrita geek in me now also wonders if the combs only spiral in one
direction.

