>> Yes, this is what we stated in our book...and I have yet to be convinced that this is incorrect (but I'm certainly open to the possibility).

>Weaire & Phelan were convinced, and so was the peer review panel for the journal "Nature", and thus so was I: 

Hold on...perhaps I'm hitting a Google block, but I'm still missing something.  

As best as I can tell, Weaire & Phelan are physicists making foam.  No observation of how bees build comb.  No conjecture as to how bees build comb....just a way to make something similar to comb using soap bubbles....showing a structure that nature uses that is also a good engineering solution (who would have thunk it?).

Of course 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...or a hydrogen atom...all out of soap bubbles.  ...yet, none of those things are constructed by making soap bubbles.  Planets look like soap bubbles, but are formed by gravity rather than surface tension.  

Here is (I think) the Nature article...very short, and nothing about what bees or what bees are doing...all about foam:
http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038/367123a0?locale=en

Neither the Nature article, or the other one you cited:
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/7_24_99/bob2.htm

....involves any observations of bees or how they build comb (although interestingly, the Nature article does refer to Plateau borders....Plateau was another blind scientist from the 19th century with assistants helping with observation....Weaire isn't so quick to dismiss the observations of a blind man).

So, what were Weaire & Phelan working on?
"We have undertaken an experiment which demonstrates Toth's proposed structure, invites a generalization of his problem to foam structures of finite liquid content, and show that the bees' choice is reinstated as superior whenever the liquid fraction is sufficiently high."
...just so there is no misunderstanding, the "bees' choice" relates to the efficiency of the honeycomb structure, not in how they construct it.

I'm always trying to learn more (and unlearn more), and would love to see some better references (either way).  A photo of a cylindrical cell that has yet to 'go in the oven' would be helpful as well.

We wrote what we wrote in 2009...it was our best evaluation of the information available to us, and at this point it remains so.

deknow

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