Data from: Honey bees and social wasps reach convergent architectural solutions to nest-building problems

The hexagonal cells built by honey bees and social wasps are an example of adaptive architecture; hexagons minimize material use, while maximizing storage space and structural stability. Hexagon building evolved independently in the bees and wasps, but in some species of both groups, the hexagonal cells are size dimorphic—small worker cells and large reproductive cells—which forces the builders to join differently sized hexagons together. This inherent tiling problem creates a unique opportunity to investigate how similar architectural challenges are solved across independent evolutionary origins. We investigated how 5 honey bee and 5 wasp species solved this problem by extracting per-cell metrics from 22,745 cells. Here, we show that all species used the same building techniques: intermediate-sized cells and pairs of non-hexagonal cells, which increase in frequency with increasing size dimorphism. We then derive a simple geometric model that explains and predicts the observed pairing of non-hexagonal cells and their rate of occurrence. Our results show that despite different building materials, comb configurations, and 179 million years of independent evolution, honey bees and social wasps have converged on the same solutions for the same architectural problems, thereby revealing fundamental building properties and evolutionary convergence in construction behavior.

蜜蜂与社会性黄蜂构建的六边形细胞是适应性建筑（adaptive architecture）的典型案例：六边形在最小化材料消耗的同时，实现了存储空间与结构稳定性的最大化。六边形建造能力在蜜蜂与黄蜂中独立演化，但两类群的部分物种中，六边形细胞存在大小二态性（size dimorphic）——即小型工蜂细胞与大型生殖细胞——这迫使建造者需将不同尺寸的六边形连接在一起。这一固有铺砌问题（tiling problem）为探究跨独立演化起源的相似建筑挑战如何被解决提供了独特契机。我们通过从22745个细胞中提取单胞指标（per-cell metrics），研究了5种蜜蜂与5种黄蜂物种对该问题的解决策略。研究表明，所有物种均采用了相同的建造技术：中等大小的细胞以及成对的非六边形细胞，且这些细胞的出现频率随大小二态性增强而升高。随后，我们推导了一个简单的几何模型（geometric model），可解释并预测观察到的非六边形细胞配对及其出现率。结果显示，尽管蜜蜂与黄蜂使用的建造材料、巢脾结构及1.79亿年的独立演化历史存在差异，但它们针对相同建筑问题趋同于相同解决方案，从而揭示了建筑行为中的基本建造特性与演化趋同（evolutionary convergence）。