A honeycomb is a bee’s home, a beekeeper’s source for honey supply, and my source of interest. Inside a bee’s hive, the walls are lined with honeycomb where larvae grow into bees and where the worker bee’s return with pollen and nectar. Their lives are centered around the hive and they all have their place in the honeycomb. Beekeeper’s today harvest honey from sheets of honeycombs that are treated like the hive. When the beekeepers go to collect the honey, they scrape the wax off of the screens and the honey oozes out as the perfect little hexagons get smushed. I find those little hexagons very interesting because they’re all the same yet they can all serve different purposes for the bees. It’s the nursery, home, and food for the larvae. But on a larger scale, I think the hexagon shape and honeycomb dynamic can be very useful.
I heard once that the circle is a very wasteful shape because no matter what material you cut out of, you usually end up with scraps after cutting out a circle. In math class, I learned that a circle is basically a polygon that has an infinite number of equal sides. I think that a hexagon is a great cross between the evenness of a circle with the ability to conserve like most polygons. I am particularly interested in honeycomb because the pattern is formed naturally by bees. The honeycomb is made when bees secrete beeswax after eating some of the honey. They then mold the wax to form the little hexagonal crevices. The bees have somehow come up with the idea of using the hexagon shape to center their whole lives around and it’s been working for them for so long. If the bees have been able to live off of the hexagon, I think that we can learn from them and incorporate the shape into our lives too.
Recently, I have noticed that people have been eating honeycomb a lot because of the sweet honey and the chewy wax that is supposed to be quite healthy and quite satisfying to watch people eat. People are starting to realize the potential of honeycomb not only for health reasons but for everyday too. I really like honeycombs because of how perfect each hexagon fits and I’ve seen designers create book shelves using hexagons because it not only helps organize but also saves space because the shape matches up with each other. Hopefully we can incorporate more natural shape occurrences into design and maybe even figure out more properties of the hexagon and maybe even save the bees.
Works Cited
Crowder, Brantley. “What Is Honeycomb?” Savannah Bee Company, 2014, https://savannahbee.com/blog/what-is-honeycomb/
