Last month we talked about one of the many examples of self organization in the honey bee superorganism - comb construction and the dynamics that govern how and when bees engage in it. At this moment, self organization is a theme in our evolutionary history of the honey bee, and it follows the principle that global order (such as comb construction) can emerge from a complex field of actors (worker bees), each responding independently to her own local conditions. As an example of how biology can be parsed into layers of systems, this month we delve deeper into comb construction and ask how cells get formed, cells of course being the units that collectively make up combs, and look at some properties of combs that emerge as natural outcomes of physicsand prior conditions.
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