There’s a lot going on in a honey bee nest but, if we ignore the actual activity, even with a casual glance the nest construction itself looks fairly organised, predictable, ‘sensible’ perhaps. You’d be forgiven for thinking of it as, well, planned. Is it? What is it we should see if we observe properly? Science writer Dave Black has some informed observations.
By Dave Black
Beekeepers are looking at honey bee combs all the time, daily even, but what do they see? Not as much as Sherlock Holmes I imagine. The fictional character, who took up beekeeping in his ‘retirement’, was famous for pointing out to Watson the futility of just looking. “You see but you do not observe” he would say1.

Whether we are simply seeing or observing our hives, we are used to picking out three distinct areas in a honey bee nest, common to both hive-bees and wild honey bees, and actually common in other species of social bees too2. Around the periphery there is a storage area for honey, and a centrally placed area of brood. Between the two there is a band of cells that, if not empty, contain pollen. The precise area each of these regions occupies waxes and wanes with the season as the nest passes through its somewhat sporadic growth cycle, but that partitioning of honey, pollen, and brood is very consistent. So consistent that if it is disturbed experienced beekeepers point to queen failure, a swarm, or some aspect of the weather to account for any disorganisation. And too, ‘mistakes happen’.
Nestling In
Even the simplest form of nest, a single, double-sided comb conjured from nothing but wax, shows the same partitioning. It develops a warm, humid brood region with food storage elsewhere. What’s more, the face of the comb mirrors the reverse or ‘back’ side3. That front-to-back symmetry is specific to that colony, at that time, and maintained by the workers all the time. In experiments that were arranged so that two independent colonies (in an observation hive) each could only occupy one side of the single comb, they still maintained that front-to-back symmetry. Brood, pollen, honey, and empty space are ‘mirrored’ on the opposite side of the comb.
The evidence is that this is largely because of the need to maintain the brood temperature efficiently, the brood on one side helping to keep brood on the other side warm. A two-sided comb is thermally more efficient that an equivalent area on a single-sided comb, and this thermally efficiency frees labour for more brood, more foraging and more comb construction. However, even when brood is absent that symmetry remains; other aspects of managing functions in the nest (like storing supplies) are more easily achieved with a two-sided comb. Symmetry means that nestmates don’t have to have global experience of the whole nest but can infer the whole from their local knowledge, while a compact, double-sided comb means more possible unloading sites are within reach with less unused, empty space. Fundamentally, it’s like the difference between the ‘parallel processing’ that random access allows and linear, sequential access. Picking out your favourite song was always quicker on an album (just access any place and drop the needle on the spot…) than it could be on a cassette tape (hold, hold, hold that forward or back button…) – if you can remember that far back.

Sweet Chaos
In colonies of honey bees that have multiple combs, each comb also has front-to-back symmetry, but each comb is not exactly the same as its neighbours, and no comb shows much symmetry with another colony’s. It’s a little puzzling why things we think are being organised in the same way don’t come up with a more symmetrical result. We are used to saying things like “pollen is put near the brood so that it’s convenient for the nurses” and “honey is stored above the brood” and imply that the ‘bees ‘know’ (or are being told) where everything should go in advance. We even make extra entrances so the “‘bees can avoid going through the brood nest to put the nectar where it belongs” (in the supers). The thing is, we do know no-one is ‘in charge’; there is no ‘plan’, no ‘template’, no blueprint’, no map. The pattern emerges, as if from chaos.
Rather than divine intervention it turns out a few simple rules are all the ‘bees (or a machine behaving like a ‘bee) need to apply that will result in the pattern we see4,5,6. These are: (1) the queen lays eggs (nearly, but not completely, at random) in warm empty cells in the middle of a comb; (2) workers periodically and randomly deposit pollen and nectar (at different rates), anywhere, or into a cell that already contains some; and (3) bees preferentially remove or consume pollen and nectar adjacent to brood cells at a greater rate than they do anywhere else.
A model applying only these rules is able to accurately ‘create’ a brood-nest pattern just like the ones we see ‘bees make. Eggs are put in cells in the middle, and stay there for at least 21 days. A portion of the nectar collected is consumed but it can be deposited in any empty cell. It will be moved or consumed if it is close to brood cells, but a peripheral ‘store’ of nectar/honey will gradually accumulate. Pollen will be eaten, but it can’t be moved, and ends up being cached in one of only two available places, the cells close to the brood being emptied, or the place where young bees emerge.
Taking Care of Beez-nest
The other thing that is different about nests that contain lots of combs is that the whole, somewhat spheroid, three-dimensional structure becomes significant, that is, more than just the sum of its parts. Bees know it. Last year the first really detailed study about how the whole nest develops, in its first 45 days, was published7. The team established 12 colonies as artificial swarms (approx. 11,000 bees each) in 10-frame Langstroth deep boxes. The wooden frames had a thin (<2mm) strip of wax to encourage the right orientation, but no foundation or wiring, and apart from an initial feed, were free to forage and construct the nest as they saw fit. Sensors collected weights every hour, and temperature every ten minutes, and once a week the bees were brushed off the frames which were then photographed on both sides under controlled conditions.
The photography was important because every pixel from the mirrorless digital camera was analysed by a computer running a trained neural network. This way they didn’t just describe the process, but could simultaneously use the data to model and predict what should happen if the experimental conditions were changed. What they were really interested in testing was what happened if they disrupted the carefully constructed 3D structure, would it harm the colony? You would think it would.
In half of the colonies (six) each week they shuffled the order of the frames, both position and front-to-back orientation, to see what would happen. Beekeepers are always curious about the same thing – do I have to put the frame back in just as I found it? Exactly how much checkerboarding can I get away with? Well, what happened was… it made no difference. Nothing indicated there was any difference in worker population, comb area, hive weight or nest temperature between the unshuffled and shuffled nests, at least over the timescale measured (two brood cycles).
That’s not the same as saying nothing happened. The reason there was no difference was that the ‘bees rapidly repaired the ‘damage’. They didn’t just make up for the damage, they restored the congruency of the original architecture. They prioritised the 3D structure of the whole nest and the way its regions are ‘connected’, fixing the gaps rather than just expanding it to ‘make up’ for the disorder. Using the same amount of wax as the unshuffled colonies, the shuffled colonies abandoned work on outlying combs, preferring to strategically infill gaps and maintain the nest’s cohesion.
Sweet Harmony
Why is this nest ‘connectedness’ so important? A ‘self-organising’ pattern has some important advantages – for the ‘bees. Foragers don’t have to worry about finding a ‘right’ place. If they put something in the ‘wrong’ place someone else moves it. It fits nicely with what we understand about the temporary space required for nectar concentrating (before there is honey to store), and the ‘self-repairing’ nature of the brood-nest.
This rapid removal of food from the brood area creates a very responsive zone between the brood and the honey, the transitory store for pollen. The size of the zone is determined by the amount of brood and the pollen being consumed to feed it. Rather than a ‘reserve’ of a specific size (which a ‘plan’ or ‘map’ might specify) this flexible space allocation reacts in real-time to the rate of egg-laying, pollen consumption and the current rate of pollen collection, directly ‘feeding back’ the needs of the colony to individual pollen foragers.
The nest is not just a structure, it is also information. If the nest becomes disorganised with, for example, pollen being stashed anywhere, it becomes, literally, incoherent, and the harmonious information flow between the inhabitants becomes meaningless babble.
Dave Black is a commercial-beekeeper-turned-hobbyist, now retired. He is a regular science writer providing commentary on “what the books don't tell you”, via his Substack Beyond Bee Books, to which you can subscribe here.
References
1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, first published in the Strand Magazine (1891) available as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) ISBN 0713914440, pg 162
2. Hepburn, H.R., Pirk, C.W.W., Duangphakdee, O., 2014. Honeybee Nests: Composition, Structure, Function. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54328-9
3. Smith et al, 2024. Form, function, and evolutionary origins of architectural symmetry in honey bee nests. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.022
4. Camazine, S., 1991. Self-organizing pattern formation on the combs of honey bee colonies. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 28. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00172140
5. Jenkins, M.J., Sneyd, J., Camazine, S., Murray, J.D., 1992. On a simplified model for pattern formation in honey bee colonies. J. Math. Biol. 30, 281–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00176152
6. Montovan, K.J., Karst, N.J., Jones, L.E., Seeley, T.D., 2013. Individual behavioral rules sustain the cell allocation pattern in the combs of honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera). Journal of Theoretical Biology 336, 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2013.07.010
7. Marting, P.R., Koger, B., Smith, M.L., 2023. Manipulating nest architecture reveals three-dimensional building strategies and colony resilience in honeybees. Proc. R. Soc. B. 290, 20222565. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.2565
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