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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

How many bees can you fit in an X-ray machine? That's not a joke [colorado.edu]:

Researchers at CU Boulder have, for the first time, used X-ray computed tomography (also known as a CT scan) to peer inside swarms of honeybees.

The scans provide a deeper look at these humble insects: Bees, the group discovered, don't clump together in a random group. Instead, they seem to form dome-shaped structures following surprisingly sophisticated mathematical rules, or what researchers call a "scaling law." The results could one day help engineers design more resilient buildings, or even swarms of tiny robots that behave a lot like insects, said study senior author Orit Peleg.

"I'm trained in physics, and these laws aren't obvious to me," said Peleg, assistant professor in the BioFrontiers Institute [colorado.edu] and Department of Computer Science [colorado.edu] at CU Boulder. "But bees somehow know how to arrange themselves in order to maintain their mechanical stability."

[...] Based on the researchers' calculations, a bee swarm works a bit like a cheerleading pyramid. More bees cluster around the base of the swarm, then thin out the farther up they get. Bees also seem to arrange themselves so that no one layer has to carry more than its fair share of weight. In mathematical terms, 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.

"What this scaling law means is that each layer winds up using the same amount of its available strength as every other layer," Shishkov said.

[...] Scaling laws like the one the team discovered are common in nature, explained study co-author Kaushik Jayaram. Among human weightlifters, for example, how many dumbbells you can lift tends to vary based on how much you weigh—a relationship that follows a surprisingly consistent mathematical formula.

"The same kind of laws seemingly apply to bees," said Jayaram, assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering. "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."

Journal Reference:
Shishkov, O., Chen, C., Madonna, C.A. et al. Strength-mass scaling law governs mass distribution inside honey bee swarms [open]. Sci Rep 12, 17388 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-21347-5 [doi.org]

Original Submission