Crystallography of Honey Bee Comb Construction

蜂巢结构的晶体学

• 批准号: 2210628
• 负责人: Francisco Lopez Jimenez
• 金额: $ 49.69万
• 依托单位: University of Colorado at Boulder
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-08-01 至 2025-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2210628&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Crystallography; Honey; Bee; Comb; Construction

The honeybee comb is a masterpiece of distributed architecture. This wax-made storage structure, which is essential to the survival of the colony, is constructed in a near-optimal manner that minimizes the wax-to-storage space ratio, due to the high energy cost associated with wax production. Honeybees construct the comb with remarkable precision, regardless of irregular boundaries or unevenness of the surface on which they work. Yet the mechanisms by which honeybees adapt their construction to the constraints of the environment (e.g., a pre-existing cavity in a tree) are poorly understood. The goal of this project is to shed light on the process of comb construction by framing it as a pattern formation process, which allows us to leverage the similarities between comb structure and the structure of non-living materials such as crystals and graphene. This project bridges tools from multiple disciplines, bringing insights from animal behavior and crystallography. The outcome of this research is a novel framework for modeling the collective behavior of honeybees as well as quantitatively describing the geometry and topology of the honeybee lattices. This project will not only help us understand the collective behavior of bees, but will also help leverage that understanding to create bio-inspired system designs in the fields of swarm robotics, collective construction, and lightweight cellular structures. This research project will address three specific questions: (1) Are the irregularities in the honeycomb structure the result of global planning that accounts for distant frustration sources (e.g., solid boundaries of a tree cavity) or a local reaction to the immediate surroundings of a given cell? (2) Can the honeycomb pattern be explained as the result of an energy minimization process, and if so, are the solutions comparable to patterns consistently found in a diverse range of self-organized crystallographic systems under geometric frustration (e.g., colloidal crystals or graphene)? (3) To what extent is the optimality of the solution to the geometric problem of comb construction modulated by large-scale changes in the environment, such as engineered boundaries, various given cell sizes, or curvature? The investigators in this project will use 3D-printing to construct precisely controlled and quantified honeycomb foundations, which can be used to introduce systematic and repeatable sources of geometric frustration in the experiments. The final comb structures will be imaged and analyzed (computer vision techniques, x-ray microscopy) to precisely characterize the geometry of individual cells and the topology of the global lattice. This rich information set will be used to develop and validate data-driven agent-based models to explore possible underlying mechanisms of collective comb construction. The approach followed in this project goes beyond the traditional view of collective behavior as stigmergy -- wherein organisms respond to local cues with little or no long-range effects -- to explore the influence of long-range interactions that are physically mediated.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Honeybee梳子是分布式建筑的杰作。由于与蜡产生相关的高能量成本，这种蜡制成的储存结构对菌落的存活至关重要，该结构以近乎最佳的方式构建，从而最大程度地降低了蜡与储存空间比。 Honeybees以显着的精度构造梳子，无论其工作表面的不规则边界或不平衡性如何。然而，霍尼贝斯将其结构适应环境的限制（例如，在树上存在的腔体）的机制知之甚少。该项目的目的是通过将其构建为模式形成过程来阐明梳子构造的过程，这使我们能够利用梳子结构与非生存材料（例如晶体和石墨烯）之间的相似性。该项目桥接了来自多个学科的工具，从而带来了动物行为和晶体学的见解。这项研究的结果是一个新颖的框架，用于建模蜜蜂的集体行为以及定量描述蜜蜂晶格的几何形状和拓扑。该项目不仅将帮助我们了解蜜蜂的集体行为，而且还将帮助利用这种理解来在群体机器人技术，集体构造和轻质蜂窝结构的领域中创建生物启发的系统设计。 该研究项目将解决三个具体问题：（1）蜂窝结构中的不规则性是全球计划的结果，它解释了遥远的挫败感来源（例如，树腔的固体边界）还是对给定细胞周围环境的局部反应？ （2）是否可以根据能量最小化过程来解释蜂窝模式，如果是的，则可以与在几何挫败感下（例如胶体晶体或石墨烯）中始终发现的模式相当吗？ （3）在多大程度上，通过大规模变化（例如工程边界），各种给定的细胞尺寸或曲率的大规模变化，对梳子结构的几何问题的最优性在多大程度上？该项目中的研究人员将使用3D打印来构建精确控制和量化的蜂窝基础，该基础可用于在实验中引入系统和可重复的几何挫败感。最终的梳子结构将成像和分析（计算机视觉技术，X射线显微镜），以精确表征单个细胞的几何形状和全局晶格的拓扑结构。此丰富的信息集将用于开发和验证基于数据驱动的代理模型，以探索集体梳子结构的潜在机制。该项目中遵循的方法超越了传统的集体行为观点，因为有机体对本地提示做出了很少或没有远距离影响的当地提示，以探索远程互动的影响，这些互动是在物理中被调解的远程互动的影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用该基金会的知识优点和广泛的范围来评估，通过评估值得进行评估，并通过评估值得进行评估。