Lovely morning today at Wendover Library, Buckinghamshire, with parents and children alike. I gae a brief reading from my book, a talk about the honeybees, followed by a book signing. Melanie Greasby, Librarian, had set it all up beautifully which added to the success of the morning. The children, as always were wonderful.

The answer to your unanswerable questions!

Why do honeybees build their comb in the shape of hexagons?

Circles wouldn’t work too well. It would leave gaps in the honeycomb. The worker bees could use triangles or squares for storage. Those wouldn’t leave gaps. But the hexagon is the strongest, most useful shape.
Humans have recently used math to find out why hexagons make the most sense and they discovered the geometry of this shape uses the least amount of material to hold the most weight.  Clever girls!

How many wild species of bees are there?

There are around 20,000 described bee species worldwide. Most of these bees are known as solitary bees with only 250 bumblebee species, 9 honey bee species and a number of social stingless bees worldwide. In Britain we have around 270 species of bee, just under 250 of which are solitary bees.

As I have said so many times, keep asking the questions.. because if I cannot answer them at the time I will send you the answers when I get home and we are all learning together!