Why honey bees built hive in perfect hexagonal shape instead of irregular shape?
Why honey bees built hive in perfect hexagonal shape ?


Honeycomb cells (not the hive or the honeycomb itself) are hexagonal, in some species of bees but not all.  The regularity of this shape has puzzled people for a long time, and Darwin (and others before him) addressed the reasons for it.  Darwin did a series of experiments with bees, and summarized his results in Origin of Species.  You can search for "hexagon" in the linked text for his long explanation, or read the (still long) summary 'Evolution of Honeycomb on the Darwin Correspondence Project, but the short explanation is that it's the most efficient way to pack cells without wasting wax, and Darwin identified a bunch of intermediate (less efficient) cell structures in various bee species that supported his hypothetized mode of evolution.


  Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known instincts, that of the hive-bee, can be explained by natural selection having taken advantage of numerous, successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts; natural selection having, by slow degrees, more and more perfectly led the bees to sweep equal spheres at a given distance from each other in a double layer, and to build up and excavate the wax along the planes of intersection. The bees, of course, no more knowing that they swept their spheres at one particular distance from each other, than they know what are the several angles of the hexagonal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates; the motive power of the process of natural selection having been the construction of cells of due strength and of the proper size and shape for the larvae, this being effected with the greatest possible economy of labour and wax; that individual swarm which thus made the best cells with least labour, and least waste of honey in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and having transmitted their newly-acquired economical instincts to new swarms, which in their turn will have had the best chance of succeeding in the struggle for existence.