Development secrets and techniques of honeybees: Examine reveals how bees construct hives in tough spots | CU Boulder Today

On a sizzling summer time day in Colorado, European honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) buzz round a cluster of hives close to Boulder Creek. Worker bees taking off in the hunt for water, nectar and pollen mingle with bees which have simply returned from the sphere. Inside the hives, partitions of hexagons are starting to take form because the bees construct their nests.

“Building a hive is a beautiful example of honeybees solving a problem collectively,” mentioned Orit Peleg, affiliate professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Computer Science. “Each bee has a little bit of wax, and each bee knows where to deposit it, but we know very little about how they make these decisions.”

In an August 2025 study in PLOS Biology, Peleg’s analysis group collaborated with Francisco López Jiménez, affiliate professor in CU’s Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, and his group to supply new perception into how bees work their hive-making magic—even in essentially the most difficult of constructing websites.

The new findings might spark concepts for brand new bio-inspired buildings and even new methods to method 3D printing.

How and why bees construct honeycomb

Honeybees can construct nests in any variety of locations, whether or not it’s a artifical field, a gap in a tree trunk or an empty area inside somebody’s attic. When a bee colony finds someplace new to name house, the bees construct their hive out of honeycomb—a waxy construction full of hexagonal cells—on no matter surfaces are round.

Building a beehive is difficult work, and it consumes numerous assets. It all begins with honey, the nutrient-dense superfood that helps bee colonies survive the winter.

To make honey, bees spend the warmest months gathering nectar from flowers. The nectar mixes with enzymes within the bees’ saliva, and the bees retailer it in honeycomb cells till it dries and thickens.

It takes roughly 2 million visits to flowers for bees to collect sufficient nectar to make a pound of honey. Then, every employee bee should eat about 8 ounces of honey to provide a single ounce of the wax they should construct extra honeycomb.

If the floor of their constructing web site is irregular, the bees need to expend much more assets constructing it, and the ensuing comb may be more durable to make use of. So effectivity is vital.

In an excellent world, bees attempt to construct honeycomb with practically excellent hexagonal cells that they use for storing meals and elevating younger larvae into adults. Mathematically, the hexagonal form is right for utilizing as little wax as doable to create as a lot space for storing as doable in every cell.

The honeycomb cells are normally a constant measurement, however when bees are compelled to construct comb on odd surfaces, they begin making irregular cells that take extra wax to construct and aren’t as optimum for storage or brood rearing.

Irregular surfaces: A puzzle for bees to resolve

Golnar Gharooni Fard, the lead writer of the brand new examine and a former CU graduate pupil, mentioned her important purpose within the examine was to grasp how bees work collectively to resolve the structural issues they may run into.

“We wanted to find the rules of decision-making in a distributed colony,” Fard mentioned.

The researchers 3D printed panels, or foundations, for bees to construct comb on. The workforce imprinted the foundations with shallow hexagonal patterns with differing cell sizes—some bigger, some smaller, and a few nearer to a median cell measurement—and added the foundations to hives for the bees to make use of.

Next, the researchers used X-ray microscopy to research patterns within the comb the bees constructed on every kind of basis. Depending on which basis they got, the bees used methods like merging cells collectively, tilting the cells at an angle or layering them on high of each other to construct usable honeycomb.

Giving bees these completely different surfaces to work with was like giving them puzzles they needed to resolve, mentioned López Jiménez.

“All those things happen in nature. If they’re building honeycomb on a tree, and at some point they get to the end of the branch, the branch might not be super flat, and they need to figure that out,” he mentioned.

It’s nonetheless not clear why bees use the methods they use in all conditions. That’s a query the researchers hope to proceed exploring.

Meanwhile, the workforce sees quite a few doable functions for his or her findings. For instance, honeycomb might encourage designs for environment friendly, light-weight buildings reminiscent of these utilized in aerospace engineering.

López Jiménez additionally likened the honeycomb constructing course of to 3D printing, the place every bee progressively provides tiny bits of wax to the bigger construction.

“The bees take turns, and they organize themselves, and we don’t know how that happens,” he mentioned. “Can we learn from how the bees organize labor or how they distribute themselves?”

CU graduate pupil Chethan Kavaraganahalli Prasanna was additionally a part of the analysis workforce.