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.

蜂巢是分布式架构的杰作。由于与蜡生产相关的高能量成本，这种蜡制成的储存结构对于殖民地的生存是必不可少的，其以接近最佳的方式构造，该方式使蜡与储存空间的比率最小化。蜜蜂以惊人的精确度建造蜂巢，而不管它们工作的表面的不规则边界或不平坦。然而，蜜蜂使其结构适应环境限制的机制（例如，树中预先存在的空腔）知之甚少。该项目的目标是通过将其构建为图案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晶体和石墨烯等非生命材料结构之间的相似性。该项目连接了来自多个学科的工具，带来了动物行为学和晶体学的见解。这项研究的成果是一个新的框架，为蜜蜂的集体行为建模，以及定量描述的几何形状和拓扑结构的蜜蜂格。该项目不仅将帮助我们了解蜜蜂的集体行为，还将有助于利用这种理解在群体机器人，集体建设和轻型细胞结构领域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否是全球规划的结果，该规划考虑了遥远的挫折来源（例如，树腔的固体边界）或对给定细胞的直接周围环境的局部反应？(2)蜂窝图案是否可以解释为能量最小化过程的结果，如果是这样，这些解决方案是否与在几何挫折下的各种自组织晶体学系统中一致发现的图案（例如，胶体晶体或石墨烯）？(3)在多大程度上是最优的解决方案的几何问题的梳子建设调制的大规模变化的环境，如工程边界，各种给定的细胞大小，或曲率？该项目的研究人员将使用3D打印来构建精确控制和量化的蜂窝基础，这些基础可用于在实验中引入系统和可重复的几何挫折来源。最终的梳状结构将被成像和分析（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。这个丰富的信息集将用于开发和验证数据驱动的基于代理的模型，以探索集体梳子构造的可能潜在机制。该项目所遵循的方法超越了传统的集体行为的耻辱观-其中生物体对局部线索的反应很少或没有长期影响-探索物理介导的长期相互作用的影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。