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This reminded me of a video I had seen a while back by ViHart about spirals and nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

Although her target audience is probably a bit younger than the people here, I still thought someone may find it interesting, especially if they hadn't thought about it much.

Edit: Also, if you have kids interested in math and these kinds of things, they may be interested in some of the other videos on her channel. She has a interesting way of presenting ideas on a few topics.

Spirals are one of those things that looks purposeful but is really easy to construct using a few simple emergent rules.

"Make new honeycomb cells at the edge of the honeycomb."

"Don't get more than 10 cells from the old honeycomb."

There you go, a 10-cell-wide spiral.

"Comb building may be better explained by the competing hypothesis of stigmergy, which holds that appropriate building behaviour is stimulated by previous construction. That is, each builder works according to an algorithm that tells her what to do when she encounters a structure at a particular stage of development. Her actions advance the structure to a new form that in turn stimulates the appropriate next step, either by her or by the next worker to encounter the building site."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282924880_Comb_Arch...

Without a rule about altitude changes or something how would you get a spiral from this rather than just a circle?
So that rule can implicit as well: avoid collision with the existing comb floor by ramping either up on top of it, or down underneath. The spiral staircase structure starts to appear as soon as you encircle the axis and choose a vertical direction to continue with. With each orbit, the structure becomes more obvious.

I don’t think there was any intention of trying to describe a comprehensive rule set in this thread.

I agree I was just trying to understand it further. I've always thought the idea of modeling the world was really interesting but it's always been a tad abstract to me so I was trying to get a little insight into it.
If the individual pods are a bit asymmetrical (not a perfect cylinder) the overall surface with have some curvature.
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." - Steven Weinberg.

Part of feels like, so what? If we figured out a mathematical model that described the phenomenon, what then?

Then we know that the "meaning" that we're looking for isn't in the bit we just figured out.

It's like the way that any time we do something that looks like AI, it's "not real AI" because we understand how it works.

"Science does not remove the terror of the gods."

There are two (at least) modes of relating to the world, one is a disassociated analytical stance, the "objective" observer, the other is an associated experiential stance, the "subjective" observer. The former leads to science while the latter leads to mysticism. Like the wave/particle models of light, each both gives something and takes something away.

If mathematical models are starting to bore you it's possible you're getting ready to explore subjective reality? (E.g. go to an aquarium and really look at a jellyfish.)

I'm a bit confused by this comment, because the article isn't really about the "why", it's mostly just a description of the phenomenon. Maybe you're responding to the clickbaity title? The nest is interesting to me, if for no other reason than that it's pretty.

That said, I can imagine that understanding the behavior of social insects, generally, might have practical implications in designing swarm robot behavior.

That's kind of the whole point of science. We can't know "what then" until we understand why.
Science doesn't really answer "why". It only provides models that allow us to predict, more or less accurately, a future state of some system based on the current state.
Sit back and marvel at the beauty of it.
Life is giant sand mandala.
so what?
Tim Heard is a dedicated and personable ex-scientist who now makes and distributes Australian native bee hives. I have a couple in my backyard and appreciate the spiral nests when I split the hive each year. http://www.sugarbag.net
Oh man thank you so much for this link. I’ve wanted to keep a native bee hive for ages, and he’s down in West End! Just down the road :)
Do they 'spiral' in different directions depending which side of the equator they are on?
The Apocrita geek in me now also wonders if the combs only spiral in one direction.