Why do bees love hexagons?
Science or Coincidence? What can it teach Product Teams? A deep dive into the mind of bees and the extraordinary laws of nature.
Nature has gifted bees with great intelligence. Throughout the centuries honeybees have tried to answer a simple question:
What shape can we use ; to divide a volume ; into shapes of equal size ; using the minimum amount of stuff ; and keeping the structure robust?
It might sound a simple question but it’s one also of the oldest questions in mathematics as well, called ‘the honeycomb Conjecture’. It’s only in 1999 that an academic research has proven correct that a hexagonal grid is the best way to divide a surface into regions of equal area with the least total perimeter.
This math question sounded oddly similar to what most product teams also tries to achieve:
What product can we build ; to serve our customers ; using the minimum amount of resources ; and keeping the product (MVP) robust?
I wanted to figure out what led bees to know what human mathematicians didn’t know for thousands of years. I also hoped that we can draw some lessons that can help product teams (Product Owners, Managers, Designers, …) work better.
1. Bees are good mathematicians. They can optimize efforts.
Bees are know to be highly intelligent. Scientists claim that the tiny insect can calculate angles and can even comprehend the roundness of the earth. Just recently, they were shown to learn the rules of ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ and apply these rules to evaluate numbers from zero to six.
These abilities might not seem extraordinary, especially compared to humans. But compared to other animals that sometimes have thousands times more neurons than bees, it is quite remarkable. Discovering these abilities proves that bees can understand mathematical concepts, can judge amounts and efforts which allow them to optimize.
2. Bees will spare efforts because wax is 8 times more difficult to produce than honey.
We, as humans, burn wax all the time. Denmark burns more candles per person than any other country in Europe. Each Dane burns around 6 kilos (13.2 pounds) of candle wax each year. That’s huge!
Bees are not at all like Dane. Any been know that wax takes efforts and energy to produce. Eight kilos of honey is consumed by bees to produce eight pounds of beeswax.
Wax is therefore extremely difficult to make and valuable for the bees and they are aware of that. Since they also know how to optimize (see paragraph 1), bees communities will always seek to produce the least possible amount of wax.
Throughout the centuries honeybees have then tried to answer the question: ‘What shape can we use to divide a volume into shapes of equal size using the minimum amount of stuff?’. Evolution made bees discover the answer way before scientists and mathematicians: hexagons.
If you’ve noticed this question
3. Bees will choose smaller honeycombs rather that larger ones. Otherwise it will break.
So far, we understand that bees will optimize wax consumption and that they have the intelligence capabilities of doing so.
But something kept bothering me. I was not sure why bees need such smaller combs. I was still wondering why don’t bees make the holes larger and therefore waste less wax. With some further research, I discovered that it is all about making the structure more robust.
In every hive, bees begin to build the comb from the top of each section and continue until they reach the bottom. When a cell is filled with honey, the bees seal it with wax. That’s the process of constructing a honeycomb.
Now imagine that you start filling in those combs with honey. One by one.
If you build very large cells, the honey inside each comb will either:
- be heavy for the surrounding wax. The structure will eventually break away and will result in losing a year-worth of efforts and hard-work
- will pour down. Bees require many trips to fill a single honeycomb and sometimes require several days to seal it. Friction or viscosity is what makes honey stay inside the honeycomb. If it’s too large, the honey will drop out.
Remember! Bees can judge efforts. Bees hate it when their honeycomb breaks as it consumes their efforts. That’s why they will make sure that their structure is robust enough to hold their honey from the first try. And that’s why bees choose smaller holes rather than larger ones.
No single bee can build a honeycomb on its own.And the same applies to Product Owners, Product Managers, Designers, Developers, … It takes team to build great products.
The 3 insights can teach us some valuable lessons when it comes to the way we work together, in teams:
A. Prioritize using your math, not your sentiments
Prioritizing is, I believe, the first lesson we all learned when working with a team. There is so much to do, that we are obliged to prioritize. However, many of us still don’t do it the right way.
We’ve seen that bees can compare numbers, distances, efforts, and the amount of pollen. They make trade-offs based on quantitative data, not sentiments. And we can all learn from it.
With more and more work coming on our desks, we often stop prioritizing based on customer surveys and interviews. We shift to sentiment and gut feeling instead and we shouldn’t. To build honeycomb-like products (i.e. great products), keep using your customers’ feedback to prioritize your work.
B. Be resource and energy efficient
Efficiency in nature is not just fast and cheap; it reflects a deeper sort of true effectiveness. For example, the bees’ honeycombs look cool, but they are also incredibly efficient. We’ve seen that the hexagon uses less material and energy than any other shape.
What if a simple existing product was better than building every piece of software yourself? What if reusing or buying existing assets was more efficient than creating ones from scratch? … Try not to spend your energy and time on low impact work. Try to address the ‘How’ before the ‘What’.
C. Don’t go “All in!” — Growth is a gradual process
Natural systems grow in a complete, connected way, with supporting systems developing in gradually. We’ve seen in Part 3 (above) that honeybees do not go all out to maximize their honeycomb for growth’s sake: they expand the hive as more space is needed for the growing population and food storage. This “just in time” or “agile” approach ensures that bees never build something they don’t need and never have excess overhead draining their energy resources.
The same applies to products we are building and designs we are crafting. Your work doesn’t need to be perfect from day one. It doesn’t need to include all the user stories or the smooth design flows you’ve imagined in your head. Your work should allow you to iterate quickly, to learn fast, and to expand when your team is ready to.
And it’s not only bees who use hexagons.
You can find hexagonal shapes on the back of turtles’ shells, on giraffes, on most insects’ eyes, … They all can be explained with a similar logic the honeycomb example: Nature is all about efficiency, utility and an occasional ability to form almost inadvertently.
I truly believe that humans can also inspire from the hexagons found in nature. We can start using the lessons we drew from bees and apply them to our daily work.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. I hope you found something useful you can take back to your team and hope it enlightened a question you might have asked yourself.
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