Honeybees know a thing or two about working with wax and fashioning elegant, symmetrical structures. Gorging themselves on honey, young worker bees slowly excrete slivers of wax, each fleck about the size of a pinhead. Other workers harvest these tiny wax scales, then carefully position and mold them to assemble a vertical comb of six-sided, or hexagonal, cells. The bees cluster in large numbers, maintaining a hive temperature of 35℃, which keeps the wax firm but malleable during cell construction.
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