Tatsuya Saga, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Kobe University, joined an international research team at Auburn University in the United States, and found that honeybees and social wasps are independent of each other and share the same geometrical structure for architectural problems that arise during nest building. He made it clear that he was evolving to take a solution.
The genus Apis and the social wasp, the genus Xymus, are thought to have diverged from each other's ancestors 1 million years ago.Both worker bees raise large brooder larvae (new queens and males) in large hexagonal chambers and worker bee larvae in smaller hexagonal chambers.However, two different sized hexagonal follicles are not regularly arranged on a single disc.It was unclear how individual bees dealt with this problem.
The research group collected photographs of five nests each of the genus Bee and Wasp, and analyzed data from 5 cells.As a result, in both bees, at the transition between small and large cells, worker bees built non-hexagonal cells, mostly pentagonal and heptagonal cells, as the size difference increased. It was a pair of tassel.In addition, when the size difference between the two types of cells was small, an intermediate-sized hexagonal cell was formed between them.
Mathematically modeling and predicting the structure of the combing disc, which consists of hexagonal cells, we found that, at the transition between cells of different sizes, the intermediate-sized cells and the pentagonal and seven-sided cells seen in real honeycombs were observed. A pattern was generated in which brood discs were formed from square florets.
Our findings show that both bees arrived at the same geometric solution to the architectural problem of nest building independently of each other.The aim is to deepen our understanding of how multiple individual animals work together to build adaptive structures without being subject to centralized control.
Paper information:[PLOS BIOLOGY] Honey bees and social wasps reach convergent architectural solutions to nest-building problems
