Bees may be hostile to a queen because she is a stranger to the hive that has been inserted by the beekeeper to replace an old queen, or she may be an old queen that is no longer laying enough eggs to meet the needs of the colony. In that situation, they will cluster around her in a ball that can be as large as three inches in diameter. Unless the queen is rescued by the beekeeper (either by using smoke or by dipping the ball in water) she will be smothered, overheated, or stung to death. To avoid this attack, beekeepers have developed various methods to safely introduce a new queen into an existing hive in order to make sure she is accepted.
Honeycomb is a hexagonal lattice of a single layer of relatively equal-sized cells in which nectar, honey, and pollen are stored and which contain the colony's eggs and developing brood. Made of beeswax, the walls of the comb are thin and translucent, but the wax can support thirty times its own weight. In 1999, Thomas Hales at the University of Michigan proved mathematically that this design is the most economical way to store the maximum amount of honey while using the least amount of beeswax for construction, although this idea was first hypothesized by Greek mathematician Pappus of Alexandria (a.d. 290–350). The sheet of wax that forms the base of the comb hangs vertically from the ceiling of the nest, and the cells fit together snugly and are arranged horizontally so their contents don't spill out, conserving space and maximizing storage capacity.
Stephen Pratt, now on the faculty at Arizona State University, explored the question of how a group of thousands of worker bees with limited information can proceed to build a pattern of comb that is best suited to the needs of the entire colony. What are the signals and cues that guide their collective decision making? After a swarm settles in a new nest site there is an initial surge of comb construction to provide cells for new brood and food storage.
It might seem advantageous to build a lot of comb early in the season so that the colony can take advantage of surges in the flow of nectar due robust blooming conditions. Having empty cells can be an advantage, since if there is a shortage of storage space, foraging will have to slow down while storer bees search for places to deposit the high volume of nectar that is being collected. Construction uses up a great deal of the colony's energy resources as the builders must gorge on stored sugar supplies in order to produce wax with which to build the comb, so simply building lots of comb to be ready for a high volume of nectar is not necessarily an economical solution.
According to Pratt's observations, the winning strategy is for additional comb to be added in "pulses" throughout the nectar-gathering season, depending variably on several factors: adequate nutrition in young bees in order to promote normal wax gland development, the presence of a queen, the rate of the daily nectar flow into the colony, and the amount of empty comb that is available. How all of these factors are synthesized by the bees into a building plan and appropriate individual construction activity still remains to be discovered.
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