> As best as I can tell, Weaire & Phelan are physicists making foam.  
> No observation of how bees build comb.

Yes, this is the elegance of natural systems - they apply to multiple cases,
as they are universal phenomena. A bell curve is "the beauty of truth",
regardless of the data set, and a Toth-like structure is "the truth of
beauty", regardless of builder or specific material used.  This purely
physical phenomenon does not require the bees to do anything other than to
create closely-packed cylinders, the starting point for the process.
Honeycomb is a "gift of physics", bestowed not just on bees, but on anyone
(or anything) building similar close-packed structures.

If you want bee-specific work to reinforce the point, Peter Borst pointed to
the very recent work of Bauer and Bienefeld (2013) in this thread, which
admitted "The current study found no round precursor cells, except during
the very early phase in the building of the cell foundations. After the
upward construction of the walls commenced, the three bottom plates became
rhomboid in shape and the cell took on a hexagonal form."  So, they found
that, even without foundation, the crystalline shapes form with a small
cell-wall height, well before the cell is fully drawn-out.  If the bees were
witnessed deliberately building any complex shapes, they did not mention it
in their abstract.

But Larry Garrett pointed to yet another paper I have not yet read,
Karihaloo, Zhang, and Wang (2013), also in this very thread, which includes
photos that both show the 3 rhombiods at the bottom, indicating that the
basic shape existed before the cell was fully drawn and excess wax cleaned
up, but they do mention bees generating heat at specific points, so they may
provide even more detail on the process.

From what I have read so far, both teams went a little too far in opposite
directions, so considering both papers together will likely do a better job
of revealing what actually happens.  It seems that the depth of cell
required is small, and the effect kicks in with beeswax when one has
"closely-packed bottle caps", as the "closely-packed cylinders".

> I can make an object that looks like a small 
> hive beetle out of a soap bubble, a turtle 
> out of a few soap bubbles...or Mickey Mouse

You can?  Please send photos, I'd love to see them.  But where's that "deep
respect for good science" espoused recently?  I think one should read the
papers cited before ridiculing them.

> our best evaluation of the information available to us, and at this point
it remains so.

I am perplexed at how anyone can feign ignorance of or flatly deny something
that has been in common discussion of topology and structures since at least
the days of Bucky Fuller and Ram Dass lectures, but I can understand the
motivation.  If one admits that the shapes of cells are a "gift of physics"
to the bees, then one would be forced to concede that the entire scheme of
"Housel Positioning" becomes an effort to re-randomize the randomly-formed.

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