Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany.
Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
PLoS Biol. 2023 Jul 27;21(7):e3002211. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002211. eCollection 2023 Jul.
The hexagonal cells built by honey bees and social wasps are an example of adaptive architecture; hexagons minimize material use, while maximizing storage space and structural stability. Hexagon building evolved independently in the bees and wasps, but in some species of both groups, the hexagonal cells are size dimorphic-small worker cells and large reproductive cells-which forces the builders to join differently sized hexagons together. This inherent tiling problem creates a unique opportunity to investigate how similar architectural challenges are solved across independent evolutionary origins. We investigated how 5 honey bee and 5 wasp species solved this problem by extracting per-cell metrics from 22,745 cells. Here, we show that all species used the same building techniques: intermediate-sized cells and pairs of non-hexagonal cells, which increase in frequency with increasing size dimorphism. We then derive a simple geometric model that explains and predicts the observed pairing of non-hexagonal cells and their rate of occurrence. Our results show that despite different building materials, comb configurations, and 179 million years of independent evolution, honey bees and social wasps have converged on the same solutions for the same architectural problems, thereby revealing fundamental building properties and evolutionary convergence in construction behavior.
蜜蜂和社会性黄蜂所构建的六边形巢室是自适应建筑的一个范例；六边形结构在最小化材料使用的同时，最大化了存储空间和结构稳定性。在蜜蜂和黄蜂中，六边形巢室的构建独立进化而来，但在这两个群体的某些物种中，六边形巢室存在大小二型——小工蜂巢室和大生殖巢室——这迫使建筑者将不同大小的六边形拼接在一起。这种内在的平铺问题为研究相似的建筑挑战如何在独立的进化起源中得到解决提供了独特的机会。我们通过从 22745 个巢室中提取每个巢室的度量指标，研究了 5 种蜜蜂和 5 种黄蜂物种如何解决这个问题。结果表明，所有物种都使用相同的建筑技术：中间大小的巢室和一对非六边形巢室，随着大小二型的增加，它们的频率也会增加。然后，我们推导出一个简单的几何模型，该模型解释并预测了非六边形巢室的配对及其出现频率。我们的研究结果表明，尽管建筑材料、巢室结构和 1.79 亿年的独立进化存在差异，但蜜蜂和社会性黄蜂已经为相同的建筑问题找到了相同的解决方案，从而揭示了基本的建筑特性和建筑行为的进化趋同。
