Hive Bee Research Paper

In this piece Darwin describes the differences between the hive bee and the humble bee. Bees have to shape their cells in ways that they hold the greatest amount of honey possible while using the least amount of wax. It seems quite amazing how these bees can make these shapes with all the angles and planes but what is amazing is that all it came from their instinct. The hive and the humble bee both structure their cells differently. At one end of the spectrum, the humble use their old their old cocoons to store honey and make separate and irregular rounded cells of wax. At the other end of the spectrum, the hive bee makes a double layer in which each cell a hexagonal prism formed of three rhombs which have certain angles. One can see the …show more content…
If we could slightly modify the instincts that the Melipona has, then the Melipona will make a structure like that of the hive bee. Darwin believed that the Hive bee attained its architectural powers from natural selection. Finally, Darwin goes in depth in regards to the natural selection of bees. The bees need to keep to consume a lot of sugar to make energy and produce wax. The bees still need to save honey even though they consume so much. For a family of bees to succeed, it needs to store a large amount of honey while saving wax. Those bees who wasted the least honey in the secretion of wax, succeeded and passed on these instincts. Their offspring then had the best chance of succeeding. The saving of wax by largely saving honey is an important element of staying alive. In entirety, the slight modifications of instinct allow the bees to survive. The hive bee is a perfect example because it’s on the extreme end of the