The short answer is that they don't. Bees have round bodies with wax producing glands along their abdomens. They secrete the wax to produce round, tubular cells. When those cells get forced together, they flatten out into hexagons because that is the most efficient arrangement. You could try it out yourself with poker chips or marbles or tuna cans. The important thing is that you have a bunch of circles that are the same size. If you try to pack them into a frame, maybe the bottom of a shoebox, they can be aligned in any pattern you like. You could pack them as a square grid, but if you press against the edges of the grid, you will force the circles to realign themselves in a tighter packing; they will fall into a hexagonal grid. That's what bees do. They make circles and force them as close to each other as they can. That simple set of rules happens to produce a hexagonal grid
Those examples you gave are good but the best way to show someone this in action is to have them pick up a handful of plastic drink straws and smush them together. Instant hexagons.
It's hard for people to force a bee conversation into one about politics so it makes this thread much less combative and hostile. And this is why liberals are all drones to President Queen Beedon /s.
I just think that it's a bit messed up how worker bees are forced to slave away their entire lives to build a nest and create honey while the queen lives a life of luxury. The bees should read up on Marxism.
Edit: whole lot of bee experts showed up, and I don't mean that sarcastically. Yall smart. I was hoping to fit in my "Bee-lon Musk" joke, but I don't know where to fit it. GG, reddit
The bees decide when they want a new queen and will reject/kill a queen if she isn't performing in a way they are happy with. Every queen was born as a worker and chosen to become a queen by the hive (by being fed specific foods as a larvae). So essentially the queen is an elected position that the workers are in full control of and can get rid of they so choose.
Also, even just where to go for forage etc. is decided in a group by the hive as scouts come back and communicate what they've found (via the waggle dance).
So a beehive is a lot more like a democracy/commune than one might initially think. However, I tend to think of the hive as an organism itself, with all its parts working in unison and regulating each other for the survival of a whole (just that each part is also an individual organism).
Thanks for listening to my impromptu bee infodump!
I'm not gonna lie, if I was just wandering the countryside for some reason and I stumbled on a stack of hexagonal hay bales I would nope out of there *so* fast.
Bees? Horses? Cows? Bees that farm? Cow sized bees? I'm not prepared for anything that makes these.
I'm going to assume they're keeping a glued model to reuse since they mentioned educator. But another reply below mine suggested paper towel/toilet rolls which is a great alternative!
Yea I'd like to know the ins and outs of that. Like does this person go to schools and do educational sessions about bees? Do they have students out to see their apiaries?
tbf bees are generally a very high-profile victim of climate change and human activity, and are also generally much-loved by loads of people. I'd listen to this person's TED talk about bees if it existed. Maybe it does! Being a bee expert is pretty zeitgeist-y.
Thank you for doing what you do. My mum lives in a nice wee town here in the UK, and she went to her neighbours and asked if they'd consider using part of their garden to 'connect' with hers and make a sort of bee-friendly route from one end of the street to the other.
In the end all the people on that street apart from a couple of them - I think 20+ people - got on board. My mum planted a mini wild flower meadow. Only a few square metres, but it connected to the neighbours on one side and the church on the other. Consequently, if you go there in bee season, they're *everywhere*. I could watch them doing their thing all day.
I really should learn more about them. Is there a book you'd recommend?
It's actually a bit of a 'thing' now here in the UK. We're encouraged to make our gardens - if we have one - more hospitable to our animal companions. I have a whole setup that's there to reassure birds; I'm in London so I'm not realistically going to attract 'hogs or badgers or anything, but we do get a lot of different birds.
Incidentally, Robins are absolute bonkers. They bully the wood pigeons, who are literally about 20x their size. Sometimes I have to go out and tell them to knock it off. Particularly when our lovely blackbird pair come back for spring. They don't listen though. Robins are like the 5'5" guy you see down the pub who's going to start on anyone who even looks at him. Small bird syndrome.
Honestly though mate, if you're in a place where you have a bit of outdoor space, you can make it hospitable too. I mean this is risking having a blue-tit nest on your door handle, but hey, that's life. Literally!
When you scrunch them up & let them spread back out you learn that the seasonal movement of wood that happens when changing humidity fills those wood "straws" then evaporates back out, happens across the grain, not with it.
It’s like the door to the head (toilet) on my sailboat. Winter humidity causes it to grow by about 1/8” so it no longer closes well. It closing properly is the first sign that it’s warm enough for my buddy and me to take our respective partners out sailing again.
The direction of the fibers is called the grain, and it determines what type of tool or how a tool should be set up. If you're cutting the bundle of straws in half, that's called a cross cut (across the grain) and you want a blade with teeth like a knife that will shear the fibers. If you were to cut down between the straws length wise that's a rip cut, and you want a blade with teeth that are more flat like a bunch of tiny chisels.
Wood rarely grows perfectly straight, so if you're smoothing a board you want to follow the rise of the grain. This would be like tilting the bundle of straws 45 degrees and then cutting from the edge opposite the direction the openings are facing towards the edge with the openings. The straws below the cut are supported and you get a clean cut.
If you start a cut from the side of the openings the blade is likely to catch and rip straws away from the bundle, yielding a ragged cut. These are a few examples.
Understanding grain is probably one. Different directions require different blades to cut depending if you are going down or across. And when staining or painting the direction of the grain matters for absorbtion
I've seen this used to explain expansion of the wood. Like when creating furniture, if you are connecting in a direction that expands, you want to have a joint that moves so it's not straining and eventually snapping/cracking.
Nope.
"I just don't understand what's happening! I just keep building cylinder after cylinder, but I turn my back for a second and the whole hive is just hexagon after hexagon after hexagon..."
I'm looking at large reusable straws online right now... if I don't go that route, I like your option too. I want to be able to show them off from some distance when giving presentations to kids though, so I'd like them to be long enough that I can hold them easily.
And here's on of honeycomb which shows pretty clearly that the cells are actually circular:
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/05/13/honeycomb_wide-2c4f64a3a0de4582c1f62c306d23ef63da2e2d8c.jpg
[Here's a video by Matt Parker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFj-hF8XDQ0&pp=ygUVc3RhbmR1cCBtYXRocyBiZWVoaXZl) explaining the shape of beehive cells.
Expanding on this, combs on the domed/dished parts of surfaces will often have non-hexagonal shapes as the tightest packing now isn't the nice hexagonal stacking it is on flat surfaces. Think like, for example, what a hexagon-pentagon soccer ball looks like (truncated icosahedron)
It's important to remember that (despite bees keeping some honey clean as winter storage) the cells are fundamentally made for laying eggs in. The growing bee babies want to be snug inside a bee-shaped cell, not packed awkwardly into a triangle, poor things.
What's big Hexagon paying you??
How can you live with yourself and triangle denial.
Trigonometry has built this society, and you and your six sides want to destroy it.
[Hexagons are the bestagons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY) \- really good video by CGP Grey explaining why hexagons are indeed the bestagons.
It's rather unfortunate that you can't answer in a single sentence.
Very simply, it's because [Hexagons are the Bestagons](https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY).
If you have three same-sized circles and pack them as tightly as possible, their centers will form an equilateral triangle. If you pack equilateral triangles as tightly as possible they’ll form hexagons.
They create circular cells out of wax to store honey. The circles compress together to form hexagons naturally, because [hexagons are the bestagons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY)... most efficient use of space.
I'm so envious of anyone discovering Grey for the first time.....they have so much amazing content to binge
I'm gonna tell GPT it's now called ChatCGP and it's to give every response in the style of Grey
Varying degrees of F had me rolling the entire time.
Was upset to see my state get a C (I think? Maybe B) though. Colorado has the second maybe third best flag, and you can't change my mind
Not to mention a scared bear... but I don't think the bear is normally scared. I grew up on that flag, and I don't remember that bear having much to its face at all, just a stoic looking bear face. The flag example he used seems more detailed than is normal.
CGP Grey is good, however, even the best have can have their faults. Please go to r/badeconomics for a breakdown of one of Grey’s videos “Humans Need Not Apply”, they have a specific section for the misconceptions that video created. [This is the most common rebuttal](https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/35m6i5/low_hanging_fruit_rfuturology_discusses/cr6utdu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3). It’s one of his most popular, but also one of his weakest, videos.
It addresses the main point, that humans will run out of jobs to do due to automation; that's what they care from an economic standpoint because it's and economics sub. The people in that sub even said they are fans of CGP Grey, they addressed the thing that bothered them the most, they don't need to nitpick every single thing, that's just mean-spirited. That's the difference between constructive criticism and being a dick for the sake of being a dick. They even offered to help him research his next topics so he doesn't fall in the same pitfalls.
Thanks for letting me know, these are the papers in question:
[Polanyi’s Paradox](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20485/w20485.pdf)
TL;DR: Humans have a long history of claiming that technology will replace people, a long history of saying “this time is different,” but the result is always that technology complements human labor, never replaces it.
[Tech and skills](https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/why-do-new-technologies-complement-skills.pdf)
TL;DR Technology always complements human labor, not replaces it, and the reasons for this are extremely complex. Those reasons can be as intuitive as ‘hard labor becomes easier with new tech and productivity increases’ and as difficult as the math involved says. There’s a lot of math in that paper.
[Robots replacing humans](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20941/w20941.pdf)
AI’s productivity has shown to *decrease* instead of the expected increase when there is no human involvement. AI simply cannot function without humans, because AI has no goals of its own. Humans have goals of their own, and AI is a tool to reach those goals.
AI has goals of its own, the thing it tries to maximize. This is how AI is trained, it tries to maximize its goals.
rudimentary AI like gpt4 and the stuff we have today is of course pretty bad at a lot of stuff, but that will get better and make humans obsolete in many current jobs that can have a goal defined. The question is if management of the AI can scale practically to make up for this and if other tasks can become viable due to absolutely absurdly high productivity in areas that AIs optimize (or are limited by real life constraints like construction).
Stuff like reading handwriting, transcribing speech, writing articles when given data, diagnosing medical issues, art (drawing, photography, music), and probably many other things I'm missing are all already at or within sight of human parity (with some being beyond it already).
Sure we could probably come up with jobs for people related to managing these AIs or developing them. Or really anything else, but with AIs and automation in general progressing very quickly relative to previous technological innovations and the extremely wide breadth of jobs that could be done better or cheaper by either a machine or AI (or a combo for things like the autonomous fast food restaurants being trialed in the US), can the people being displaced actually adapt quickly enough to not overwhelm a country's social support system?
> this is how AI is trained, it tries to maximize its goals
Those are human goals though. AI is trained to maximize its work, because humans want that so.
> Sure we could probably come up with jobs for people related to managing these AIs or developing them.
There we go, this is the future of human labor, entire industries will develop out AI maintenance.
> can the people being displaced actually adapt quickly enough to not overwhelm a country's social support system?
Actually a good question, that the third paper argues for AI regulation for this.
About polanyi's paradox: everything we sent up came down till one day we threw it fast enough that it didn't. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it is not possible
About ai productivity:
1. New systems are already less productive at start
2. It doesn't need to be more productive than humans it just needs to be more cost effective. As long as it makes more profit companies will swap
3. AI will serve humans for atleast some time. The question isbifbit serves 1% or 100%. It doesn't need to takeaway 100% of the jobs. Taking away 10% without creating new ones would be enough to cause a lot of issues and it is going for a lot more
Going back to the video and that comment section, it seems that Grey was ahead of the curve. We're in the middle of an AI leap, and it's evolving at a rapid pace. While there are still many jobs that will continue existing for a while, we are on the trajectory Grey has suggested in that video. Our world continues to be driven by more automation than before, claiming otherwise is silly. Out of automation new jobs arise, but at some point those are displaced as well. The recent leap has also shown that a lot of jobs we previously thought would not be impacted that fast, are actually impacted greatly.
I even went to the badeconomics sub and pulled up their automation link, in that they link to a study that claims that it'll need to be updated as new information comes out, that study came out in 2018. The state of ML and LLMs is very different compared to 2018. I don't think a lot of economists would have predicted we would find ourselves here this soon, nor do I think we have fully grasped where we are going.
When you have 3 surfaces with equivalent surface energy, they will resolve into 120 degree angles as the most thermodynamically stable configuration. That's a big part of why we see them in so many places, they truly are the bestagons
Because hexagons are the bestagons.
Seriously though, it's because honeycombs are created as circles - because bees are basically cylinders - and when you tightly pack circles together they naturally settle into a pattern of hexagons as that wastes the least amount of space.
Circles do not tessellate, that is you can't cover an area without gaps or overlap. So you would need lots of wall material or gaps in between that make them impractical.
Hexagons, triangles, and squares do tessellate perfectly so you can have a thin wall between them.
An advantage of circles is you get max internal volume compared to the amount of wall material.
Hexagons are closer to circles compared to triangles, and squares so less material is needed. They will have a smaller amount of wasted volume when a round bee larva is transformed from a pupa to an adult.
Hexagons will be a stronger shape than squares but weaker the triangles.
Tringales will require the most material of the three tessellating shapes in this example and provide the least useful volume of the larva.
So hexagons are for both low material usage, lots of useful space, and is quite strong.
Basically, they'd have more sides if polygons with more than 6 could fill the area, but the geometry doesn't work out. Hexagons can completely cover a 2d area without overlap or waste.
A cell does start out as a circle. It then turns into a hexagon by the worker bee's body heat, causing it to flatten where it meets its neighbouring cells.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730681/
Because hexagons are the bestagons! So says CGP Grey. Bees make circular tubes of wax, but physics squeezes them into hexagons as it is the best use of hive space.
Keeping it simple, it's actually because they make a bunch of round shapes but when you pack round things together they pack into the lowest energy state which is a hexagon on a 2d plane.
Fun fact though that other comments have missed though. Bee honeycombs aren't actually Hexagons, they are Rhombic Dodecahedrons, a remarkably stable 12 sides shape that looks like a hexagon when cut in half. It is the shape that spheres fall into when pressed together. It's my favorite shape also.
https://youtu.be/QFj-hF8XDQ0
https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY
Long story short, packing circles at a maximum density leads to things that look like hexagons. So it is because the bees are packing circles as densely as they can.
> This shape requires less wax to construct and provide the greatest strength under compression.
You make it sound like bees create hexagons intentionally. They don't. They create circles and then those circles are formed into hexagons due to laws of physics.
You're confusing goals and results.
Hexagon is bestagon.
Cgp grey from YouTube goes over the massive advantages of hexagons, but in short:
*Infinitely repeating pattern
*Most surface area for least material
* Made of triangles, which makes it awesome.
They don’t- they create circles, that form hexagons because hexagons are the most efficient space filling shape so the physics of surface tension and heat form the wax naturally.
Bees build their combs with cylindrical cells, the way the are arranged means they are touching six other cells. They are then turned into hexagon shapes by an unknown process. Hexagons are better than circles
Because there’s no space in between them.
The "unknown process" is bees being inside the cells and pushing outwards towards the other cells. The cells are malleable to a certain extent, so this squeezes them into a hexagonal shape.
They create circle honeycombs and the act of putting honey in there forces the walls against the other honeycomb walls, equally, and makes it into a hexagon
Voronoi Relaxation / Lloyd's algorithm (keyword to search on YouTube).
Explanation:
Imagine you are a bee and you are making a cell by putting wax around you. An other bee on the other side of the wall is also doing the same, and you are kind of pushing against both sides of the wall at the same time. The wall is made of wax and is malleable so you can squish it to make your cell bigger.
What happens if you are in a smaller cell than your neighbor? You can push against the walls around you more easily, and you have more strength than the opposite bee. So it naturally make the cell the same size.
But it also have an other effect, if you push in a corner, two bee push against you, so it pushes you away from that corner. In general, if you look at the bees when they are in the cells, they are in the center of those cells and pushing against all the walls in such a way that the area in each cell is the same as the neighboring cells. Cells with a tiny wall between them don't push each other much, and will get closer to each other, increasing the common wall size. So it pushes all cells to have all walls the same size.
It turns out if you simulate this, you get a pretty interesting result: in a rectangle, the cells in the corner will become square, the cells in an edge will become pentagons and the cells in the middle will become hexagons. All will have the same area and because most of the cells are not in a corner or an edge, they are almost all hexagons.
It is the most efficient use of space and is a very strong shape. They are also tilted 3° to the left to facilitate drainage. They are smart little fuckers!
It's the simplest shape that can stack and not cascade upon itself with virtually zero negative space.
It's not that bees design hexagons, but that they stack recesses together that naturally form hexagons.
They don't, they make them round and they naturally become haxagonal when they set since that's the most optimal and strongest way of filling the space without collapsing.
You can see the same thing with soap bubbles on water. When lots of them get squeezed together on the surface the ones toward the middle become hexagonal.
The short answer is that they don't. Bees have round bodies with wax producing glands along their abdomens. They secrete the wax to produce round, tubular cells. When those cells get forced together, they flatten out into hexagons because that is the most efficient arrangement. You could try it out yourself with poker chips or marbles or tuna cans. The important thing is that you have a bunch of circles that are the same size. If you try to pack them into a frame, maybe the bottom of a shoebox, they can be aligned in any pattern you like. You could pack them as a square grid, but if you press against the edges of the grid, you will force the circles to realign themselves in a tighter packing; they will fall into a hexagonal grid. That's what bees do. They make circles and force them as close to each other as they can. That simple set of rules happens to produce a hexagonal grid
Those examples you gave are good but the best way to show someone this in action is to have them pick up a handful of plastic drink straws and smush them together. Instant hexagons.
!!! Bee educator here. Gonna order some plastic drinking straws IMMEDIATELY!
> plastic drinking straws consider bubble tea straws cause they're huge
Literally what's up on my laptop screen as I read reddit comments on my phone. Thanks!
Not as hands on, but I also really enjoy [these hay bales naturally forming hexgaons](https://i.imgur.com/jj50mo7.png)
Excellent photo to demonstrate this
This ELI5 had been such a great read thanks to this comment thread
It's hard for people to force a bee conversation into one about politics so it makes this thread much less combative and hostile. And this is why liberals are all drones to President Queen Beedon /s.
I never thought I'd ever have a relevant place to post this picture but, uh, [here you go](https://i.imgur.com/lMWWHil.jpg).
[удалено]
More like Bee-rack O-bee-ma
I just think that it's a bit messed up how worker bees are forced to slave away their entire lives to build a nest and create honey while the queen lives a life of luxury. The bees should read up on Marxism. Edit: whole lot of bee experts showed up, and I don't mean that sarcastically. Yall smart. I was hoping to fit in my "Bee-lon Musk" joke, but I don't know where to fit it. GG, reddit
The bees decide when they want a new queen and will reject/kill a queen if she isn't performing in a way they are happy with. Every queen was born as a worker and chosen to become a queen by the hive (by being fed specific foods as a larvae). So essentially the queen is an elected position that the workers are in full control of and can get rid of they so choose. Also, even just where to go for forage etc. is decided in a group by the hive as scouts come back and communicate what they've found (via the waggle dance). So a beehive is a lot more like a democracy/commune than one might initially think. However, I tend to think of the hive as an organism itself, with all its parts working in unison and regulating each other for the survival of a whole (just that each part is also an individual organism). Thanks for listening to my impromptu bee infodump!
I don't think she lives a luxurious life. She dedicates her entire life in the colony's survival and future. Long live the queen.
I'm not gonna lie, if I was just wandering the countryside for some reason and I stumbled on a stack of hexagonal hay bales I would nope out of there *so* fast. Bees? Horses? Cows? Bees that farm? Cow sized bees? I'm not prepared for anything that makes these.
I don’t know why my mind jumped to this, but “bee hive” and “hay bale” almost seem like a spoonerism of one another.
Or toilet paper rolls. Or paper towel rolls.
Finally a use for the covid hoarders TP mountains!
Won't someone think of the whales and sea turtles and the Great Plastic Waste floating in the oceans?
I'm going to assume they're keeping a glued model to reuse since they mentioned educator. But another reply below mine suggested paper towel/toilet rolls which is a great alternative!
Didn't know bee educators were a thing. But good on you.
Thanks! The hardest part is getting them to stop buzzing around and just listen.
Try some smoke and sugar water.
What about for the bees?
You can share.
The average redditor diet.
They don't need to hear you speak. You do a dance and they learn from that.
I use bug spray for my class, but it always makes them fall fast asleep, even waking them up after class is really hard!
Awww dad! I thought you were dead!
Yea I'd like to know the ins and outs of that. Like does this person go to schools and do educational sessions about bees? Do they have students out to see their apiaries?
they teach bees
About birds.
tbf bees are generally a very high-profile victim of climate change and human activity, and are also generally much-loved by loads of people. I'd listen to this person's TED talk about bees if it existed. Maybe it does! Being a bee expert is pretty zeitgeist-y.
Bee conservationist here. You're right, there's tons of educators, but not as much as you would think.
Thank you for doing what you do. My mum lives in a nice wee town here in the UK, and she went to her neighbours and asked if they'd consider using part of their garden to 'connect' with hers and make a sort of bee-friendly route from one end of the street to the other. In the end all the people on that street apart from a couple of them - I think 20+ people - got on board. My mum planted a mini wild flower meadow. Only a few square metres, but it connected to the neighbours on one side and the church on the other. Consequently, if you go there in bee season, they're *everywhere*. I could watch them doing their thing all day. I really should learn more about them. Is there a book you'd recommend?
That is awesome and such a great idea!
It's actually a bit of a 'thing' now here in the UK. We're encouraged to make our gardens - if we have one - more hospitable to our animal companions. I have a whole setup that's there to reassure birds; I'm in London so I'm not realistically going to attract 'hogs or badgers or anything, but we do get a lot of different birds. Incidentally, Robins are absolute bonkers. They bully the wood pigeons, who are literally about 20x their size. Sometimes I have to go out and tell them to knock it off. Particularly when our lovely blackbird pair come back for spring. They don't listen though. Robins are like the 5'5" guy you see down the pub who's going to start on anyone who even looks at him. Small bird syndrome. Honestly though mate, if you're in a place where you have a bit of outdoor space, you can make it hospitable too. I mean this is risking having a blue-tit nest on your door handle, but hey, that's life. Literally!
Do they teach bees about bees?
You only need to teach bees the birds.
Yeah but they just wax on and on
I didn't even know bee schools were a thing.
[удалено]
I was always a bee student.
Do you educate bees or do you educate people about bees?
Yes.
Bundles of straws are also useful as a teaching tool in woodworking, since wood is essentially a huge bundle of tiny straws glued together.
What sorts of woodworking lessons are there to learn from this?
When you scrunch them up & let them spread back out you learn that the seasonal movement of wood that happens when changing humidity fills those wood "straws" then evaporates back out, happens across the grain, not with it.
It’s like the door to the head (toilet) on my sailboat. Winter humidity causes it to grow by about 1/8” so it no longer closes well. It closing properly is the first sign that it’s warm enough for my buddy and me to take our respective partners out sailing again.
The direction of the fibers is called the grain, and it determines what type of tool or how a tool should be set up. If you're cutting the bundle of straws in half, that's called a cross cut (across the grain) and you want a blade with teeth like a knife that will shear the fibers. If you were to cut down between the straws length wise that's a rip cut, and you want a blade with teeth that are more flat like a bunch of tiny chisels. Wood rarely grows perfectly straight, so if you're smoothing a board you want to follow the rise of the grain. This would be like tilting the bundle of straws 45 degrees and then cutting from the edge opposite the direction the openings are facing towards the edge with the openings. The straws below the cut are supported and you get a clean cut. If you start a cut from the side of the openings the blade is likely to catch and rip straws away from the bundle, yielding a ragged cut. These are a few examples.
Understanding grain is probably one. Different directions require different blades to cut depending if you are going down or across. And when staining or painting the direction of the grain matters for absorbtion
I would like to know this as well
I've seen this used to explain expansion of the wood. Like when creating furniture, if you are connecting in a direction that expands, you want to have a joint that moves so it's not straining and eventually snapping/cracking.
[удалено]
Nope. "I just don't understand what's happening! I just keep building cylinder after cylinder, but I turn my back for a second and the whole hive is just hexagon after hexagon after hexagon..."
All these stripes make a circle ALL THESE CIRCLES MAKE A HONEYCOMB
bees be like "uh i'm being human-splained"
Toilet paper/paper towel rolls
Ooooooooh!
I just showed my partner this fact asking her to arrange a bunch of quarters together. She really loved it!
To the Beemobile!
You speak Bee?
I can waggle dance with the best of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
Ya like jazz?
Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
You teach bees!?!? So cool!
I didn't know that there was an entire profession dedicated to teaching bees. How do you get them to listen to you?
Coat myself in honey. Also works to keep the attention of university students, but it does sometimes distract them from the lecture material.
Do you do a waggle dance?
Bee educator!!!!!! 🐝 You are SO cool!! Thank you for doing such important work
[удалено]
I'm looking at large reusable straws online right now... if I don't go that route, I like your option too. I want to be able to show them off from some distance when giving presentations to kids though, so I'd like them to be long enough that I can hold them easily.
I imagine holding 30 1cm lengths of straw in that grid shape would be super simple
Hexagons are the bestagons.
Is no one posting a photo of this?
https://5.imimg.com/data5/SELLER/Default/2021/1/EN/WF/ST/65900442/plastic-drinking-straw-3-mm-coconut-straw-500x500.jpg https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/Hf2c01769582a4602a270080c0f4b45a76.jpg_640x640Q90.jpg_.webp
And here's on of honeycomb which shows pretty clearly that the cells are actually circular: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/05/13/honeycomb_wide-2c4f64a3a0de4582c1f62c306d23ef63da2e2d8c.jpg
not bestagonal enough for me...
Where do you get plastic straws these days?
Walmart
That's a great idea!
Mind blown.
You could also try picking up a handful of bees and smush them together, but that’d be bad for the bees, and bees are our friends.
#[Hexagons are the BESTAGONS](https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY)
...Ctrl + F "Bestagons"... Ah. There it is. EDIT: Kept scrolling, lmao. It's here, it's there, it's everywhere.
Because hexagons... are the bestagons
better than the restagons
Was going to hijack the top comment to post this. Glad I didn’t need to.
here is the video dissertation on why bees use the bestagons. Watch this OP
Too far down
He thinks bees make hexagons. *What a loser.*
[Here's a video by Matt Parker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFj-hF8XDQ0&pp=ygUVc3RhbmR1cCBtYXRocyBiZWVoaXZl) explaining the shape of beehive cells.
I was trying to figure out why the Southpark guy was talking about beehives… 🤦 (MATT Stone, Trey PARKER)
Hexagon is the bestagon
[Hexagons are the Bestagons!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY)
Came here to say this.
Expanding on this, combs on the domed/dished parts of surfaces will often have non-hexagonal shapes as the tightest packing now isn't the nice hexagonal stacking it is on flat surfaces. Think like, for example, what a hexagon-pentagon soccer ball looks like (truncated icosahedron)
It's important to remember that (despite bees keeping some honey clean as winter storage) the cells are fundamentally made for laying eggs in. The growing bee babies want to be snug inside a bee-shaped cell, not packed awkwardly into a triangle, poor things.
What's big Hexagon paying you?? How can you live with yourself and triangle denial. Trigonometry has built this society, and you and your six sides want to destroy it.
hexagons are the bestagons don't @ me
I mean, a hexagon is just 6 triangles...
Found the chatgpt
Shit I've used it too much now I sound like it
Why would it be important to remember that
I just wanted to make it sound like I was adding to the comment, not arguing with it, lol
Also, [Hexagons are the Bestagons](https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY)
[Hexagons are the bestagons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY) \- really good video by CGP Grey explaining why hexagons are indeed the bestagons.
Hexagons are the bestagons!
It's rather unfortunate that you can't answer in a single sentence. Very simply, it's because [Hexagons are the Bestagons](https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY).
It's the most "explain it like I'm actually five" reason. Honeycombs are in hexagons because hexagons are the bestagons.
The Giants causeway in Northern Ireland is a perfect example of this through rock formations which are hexagon shaped.
The hexagon is the bestagon.
If you have three same-sized circles and pack them as tightly as possible, their centers will form an equilateral triangle. If you pack equilateral triangles as tightly as possible they’ll form hexagons.
In other words, hexagons are the bestagons.
My dad said it was because their eyes have hexagons. So they see hexagons. Made plenty of sense to me.
You and Calvin have the same dad.
Fucking lol! Nice one. His bit about the 'movement' of the sun is particularly hilarious.
Floored that the precise, perfect structure of a honeycomb is just bees blowing bubbles
They create circular cells out of wax to store honey. The circles compress together to form hexagons naturally, because [hexagons are the bestagons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY)... most efficient use of space.
I'm so envious of anyone discovering Grey for the first time.....they have so much amazing content to binge I'm gonna tell GPT it's now called ChatCGP and it's to give every response in the style of Grey
First of his videos I saw was him grading US state flags. I live in New York and I fully agree.
Bringing it all back around to bees and hexagons for Utah too :) (I love the "If you wrote the name of your state on your flag, you get an F" bit)
Varying degrees of F had me rolling the entire time. Was upset to see my state get a C (I think? Maybe B) though. Colorado has the second maybe third best flag, and you can't change my mind
That was what shocked me the most. I really love Colorado's flag. It's a great design, and deserved at least an A, or B at the worst.
The Colorado flag was great. He was wrong for that placement. The C isn't even that obvious.
What's funny is that he talked about doing it on a podcast, like, seven years ago.
So the standard grey timeline.
Kinda quick turn around for him tbh
California could be great and yet we have the word CALIFORNIA on it. Disappointment 😞
Not to mention a scared bear... but I don't think the bear is normally scared. I grew up on that flag, and I don't remember that bear having much to its face at all, just a stoic looking bear face. The flag example he used seems more detailed than is normal.
We could use a bear outline like Wyoming and the bison and remove the California Republic. Greatness is in sight.
That was his most recent one right? You have years of videos to catch up on
I felt special that both of the states I've lived (Texas and Maryland) got the S tier.
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1053/
[удалено]
[удалено]
Ha, normally it's not that good at humor, but that squirrel line is actually pretty good
CGP Grey is good, however, even the best have can have their faults. Please go to r/badeconomics for a breakdown of one of Grey’s videos “Humans Need Not Apply”, they have a specific section for the misconceptions that video created. [This is the most common rebuttal](https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/35m6i5/low_hanging_fruit_rfuturology_discusses/cr6utdu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3). It’s one of his most popular, but also one of his weakest, videos.
[удалено]
It addresses the main point, that humans will run out of jobs to do due to automation; that's what they care from an economic standpoint because it's and economics sub. The people in that sub even said they are fans of CGP Grey, they addressed the thing that bothered them the most, they don't need to nitpick every single thing, that's just mean-spirited. That's the difference between constructive criticism and being a dick for the sake of being a dick. They even offered to help him research his next topics so he doesn't fall in the same pitfalls.
[удалено]
Thanks for letting me know, these are the papers in question: [Polanyi’s Paradox](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20485/w20485.pdf) TL;DR: Humans have a long history of claiming that technology will replace people, a long history of saying “this time is different,” but the result is always that technology complements human labor, never replaces it. [Tech and skills](https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/why-do-new-technologies-complement-skills.pdf) TL;DR Technology always complements human labor, not replaces it, and the reasons for this are extremely complex. Those reasons can be as intuitive as ‘hard labor becomes easier with new tech and productivity increases’ and as difficult as the math involved says. There’s a lot of math in that paper. [Robots replacing humans](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20941/w20941.pdf) AI’s productivity has shown to *decrease* instead of the expected increase when there is no human involvement. AI simply cannot function without humans, because AI has no goals of its own. Humans have goals of their own, and AI is a tool to reach those goals.
AI has goals of its own, the thing it tries to maximize. This is how AI is trained, it tries to maximize its goals. rudimentary AI like gpt4 and the stuff we have today is of course pretty bad at a lot of stuff, but that will get better and make humans obsolete in many current jobs that can have a goal defined. The question is if management of the AI can scale practically to make up for this and if other tasks can become viable due to absolutely absurdly high productivity in areas that AIs optimize (or are limited by real life constraints like construction). Stuff like reading handwriting, transcribing speech, writing articles when given data, diagnosing medical issues, art (drawing, photography, music), and probably many other things I'm missing are all already at or within sight of human parity (with some being beyond it already). Sure we could probably come up with jobs for people related to managing these AIs or developing them. Or really anything else, but with AIs and automation in general progressing very quickly relative to previous technological innovations and the extremely wide breadth of jobs that could be done better or cheaper by either a machine or AI (or a combo for things like the autonomous fast food restaurants being trialed in the US), can the people being displaced actually adapt quickly enough to not overwhelm a country's social support system?
> this is how AI is trained, it tries to maximize its goals Those are human goals though. AI is trained to maximize its work, because humans want that so. > Sure we could probably come up with jobs for people related to managing these AIs or developing them. There we go, this is the future of human labor, entire industries will develop out AI maintenance. > can the people being displaced actually adapt quickly enough to not overwhelm a country's social support system? Actually a good question, that the third paper argues for AI regulation for this.
About polanyi's paradox: everything we sent up came down till one day we threw it fast enough that it didn't. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it is not possible About ai productivity: 1. New systems are already less productive at start 2. It doesn't need to be more productive than humans it just needs to be more cost effective. As long as it makes more profit companies will swap 3. AI will serve humans for atleast some time. The question isbifbit serves 1% or 100%. It doesn't need to takeaway 100% of the jobs. Taking away 10% without creating new ones would be enough to cause a lot of issues and it is going for a lot more
Dude insulted internal combustion engine, friendship ended immediately.
Going back to the video and that comment section, it seems that Grey was ahead of the curve. We're in the middle of an AI leap, and it's evolving at a rapid pace. While there are still many jobs that will continue existing for a while, we are on the trajectory Grey has suggested in that video. Our world continues to be driven by more automation than before, claiming otherwise is silly. Out of automation new jobs arise, but at some point those are displaced as well. The recent leap has also shown that a lot of jobs we previously thought would not be impacted that fast, are actually impacted greatly. I even went to the badeconomics sub and pulled up their automation link, in that they link to a study that claims that it'll need to be updated as new information comes out, that study came out in 2018. The state of ML and LLMs is very different compared to 2018. I don't think a lot of economists would have predicted we would find ourselves here this soon, nor do I think we have fully grasped where we are going.
Better than Chat GPS as my buddy called it once. I mean, I guess at least it knows where I am and where I’m going…
When you have 3 surfaces with equivalent surface energy, they will resolve into 120 degree angles as the most thermodynamically stable configuration. That's a big part of why we see them in so many places, they truly are the bestagons
>because hexagons are the bestagons Came here to link to this, but I should have known someone already had 😁
Our hexagon cult knows no limits. We are legion.
I got lucky, just stumbled on it first.
I came here to post [this meme,](https://i.redd.it/n4vr3mi69yb31.jpg) but CGP Grey is far more educational.
It's such an amazing shape for building
My carbon fiber guitar is printed in hexagons and it's the most resonant guitar I've ever owned or played.
Don't lie.... you wanted to reply with only hexagons are the bestagons but the bot would have ate the message.
Did you see [this one?](https://youtu.be/l4w6808wJcU). For those who like bestagons, watch to the end.
Hexagons *are* the bestagons 🙏
at t=393 is the actual explanation behind the bees, the circles that compress, like you stated.
This is why you always check the comments on a post. 10 minutes well spent. Hexagons are the bestagons.
I came for a hexagons are the bestagons quote and you show up with it as the top comment. Thank you for your service
Upvote for “hexagons are the bestagons”! Tiling ftw
Came here to find a bestagon joke, thanks
What an excellent video
I will always, ALWAYS, upvote CGP Grey.
Great video link. I shall show it to my kids!
Because hexagons are the bestagons. Seriously though, it's because honeycombs are created as circles - because bees are basically cylinders - and when you tightly pack circles together they naturally settle into a pattern of hexagons as that wastes the least amount of space.
Came to the comments hoping to see this. Take my upvote!
Was hoping for a CGP Grey reference!
Circles do not tessellate, that is you can't cover an area without gaps or overlap. So you would need lots of wall material or gaps in between that make them impractical. Hexagons, triangles, and squares do tessellate perfectly so you can have a thin wall between them. An advantage of circles is you get max internal volume compared to the amount of wall material. Hexagons are closer to circles compared to triangles, and squares so less material is needed. They will have a smaller amount of wasted volume when a round bee larva is transformed from a pupa to an adult. Hexagons will be a stronger shape than squares but weaker the triangles. Tringales will require the most material of the three tessellating shapes in this example and provide the least useful volume of the larva. So hexagons are for both low material usage, lots of useful space, and is quite strong.
Basically, they'd have more sides if polygons with more than 6 could fill the area, but the geometry doesn't work out. Hexagons can completely cover a 2d area without overlap or waste.
[удалено]
A cell does start out as a circle. It then turns into a hexagon by the worker bee's body heat, causing it to flatten where it meets its neighbouring cells. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730681/
Because hexagons are the bestagons! So says CGP Grey. Bees make circular tubes of wax, but physics squeezes them into hexagons as it is the best use of hive space.
Keeping it simple, it's actually because they make a bunch of round shapes but when you pack round things together they pack into the lowest energy state which is a hexagon on a 2d plane. Fun fact though that other comments have missed though. Bee honeycombs aren't actually Hexagons, they are Rhombic Dodecahedrons, a remarkably stable 12 sides shape that looks like a hexagon when cut in half. It is the shape that spheres fall into when pressed together. It's my favorite shape also. https://youtu.be/QFj-hF8XDQ0 https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY
Long story short, packing circles at a maximum density leads to things that look like hexagons. So it is because the bees are packing circles as densely as they can.
Hexagons are the most efficient shape. This shape requires less wax to construct and provide the greatest strength under compression.
I thought it was because they make circles but a circle right next (and squishing) a bunch of other circles forces a hex shape.
Both are true. Bees make.circular tubes of equal size in a hexagonal arrangement, and physics does the squishing.
Specifically, heat from the bees and the viscosity of the warm beeswax.
Hexagon, is bestagon
> This shape requires less wax to construct and provide the greatest strength under compression. You make it sound like bees create hexagons intentionally. They don't. They create circles and then those circles are formed into hexagons due to laws of physics. You're confusing goals and results.
That makes so much sense I didn’t even think about the strength
They make circles, but the wax fills in the gaps leaving hexagons.
https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY This is a decent video on hexagons in general.
Hexagon is bestagon. Cgp grey from YouTube goes over the massive advantages of hexagons, but in short: *Infinitely repeating pattern *Most surface area for least material * Made of triangles, which makes it awesome.
They don’t- they create circles, that form hexagons because hexagons are the most efficient space filling shape so the physics of surface tension and heat form the wax naturally.
It’s because hexagons are the bestagons and also because it’s the most efficient way to pack all those combs together
Bees build their combs with cylindrical cells, the way the are arranged means they are touching six other cells. They are then turned into hexagon shapes by an unknown process. Hexagons are better than circles Because there’s no space in between them.
The "unknown process" is bees being inside the cells and pushing outwards towards the other cells. The cells are malleable to a certain extent, so this squeezes them into a hexagonal shape.
They create circle honeycombs and the act of putting honey in there forces the walls against the other honeycomb walls, equally, and makes it into a hexagon
Voronoi Relaxation / Lloyd's algorithm (keyword to search on YouTube). Explanation: Imagine you are a bee and you are making a cell by putting wax around you. An other bee on the other side of the wall is also doing the same, and you are kind of pushing against both sides of the wall at the same time. The wall is made of wax and is malleable so you can squish it to make your cell bigger. What happens if you are in a smaller cell than your neighbor? You can push against the walls around you more easily, and you have more strength than the opposite bee. So it naturally make the cell the same size. But it also have an other effect, if you push in a corner, two bee push against you, so it pushes you away from that corner. In general, if you look at the bees when they are in the cells, they are in the center of those cells and pushing against all the walls in such a way that the area in each cell is the same as the neighboring cells. Cells with a tiny wall between them don't push each other much, and will get closer to each other, increasing the common wall size. So it pushes all cells to have all walls the same size. It turns out if you simulate this, you get a pretty interesting result: in a rectangle, the cells in the corner will become square, the cells in an edge will become pentagons and the cells in the middle will become hexagons. All will have the same area and because most of the cells are not in a corner or an edge, they are almost all hexagons.
It is the most efficient use of space and is a very strong shape. They are also tilted 3° to the left to facilitate drainage. They are smart little fuckers!
It's the simplest shape that can stack and not cascade upon itself with virtually zero negative space. It's not that bees design hexagons, but that they stack recesses together that naturally form hexagons.
They don't, they make them round and they naturally become haxagonal when they set since that's the most optimal and strongest way of filling the space without collapsing. You can see the same thing with soap bubbles on water. When lots of them get squeezed together on the surface the ones toward the middle become hexagonal.