University of Colorado Boulder researchers have for the first time used a CT scan machine to see the inner workings of honey bee swarms. These X-rays revealed that the bees don’t clump together randomly, but rather form dome-shaped structures that follow sophisticated mathematical rules, or the ‘scaling law’.
Getting the honey bees to swarm in a laboratory was the trickiest part of the entire experiment, as it required honey bee queens to coax thousands of worker bees into a wriggly Jell-O mold. Next, the researchers had to rotate those swarms in front of a small CT machine originally developed for veterinary hospitals. With everything working properly, they found that more bees cluster around the base of the swarm and then thin out further up. Mathematically speaking, the structure follows a scaling law in which each layer supports a weight that equals roughly its own weight to the one-and-a-half power.
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What this scaling law means is that each layer winds up using the same amount of its available strength as every other layer. The same kind of laws seemingly apply to bees. The existence of this scaling law hints that there might be general principles of organization for structures like these that we don’t know about yet,” said Jayaram, assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering
