> But I’m still not at the stage where 
> I could explain this theory to a five 
> year old.

I've had the pleasure of raising two boys, who were each 5 at one time, so I
am pretty good at it.   Game on.

In essence, the energy of any system tends minimize.  

Everything else I will say here is a simple application of that universal
explanation of how things work.  So, given a chance, a fluid will always
present a minimal surface area to the "outside world".  So, surface tension
is going to naturally tend to minimize, and the classic demonstration of
this uses soap bubbles.  

Show your 5-year-old this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GbdQrR2nTRA

You can see the deformation to hex honeycomb shapes start when you have as
few as 3 adjacent bubbles, as in this video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RXO7-Lajxdg

The minimum work required to show this effect would be to join 3 surfaces,
and watch them keep forming 120-degree angles, no matter how much you
manipulate the process:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YdneSMKObls

If you are impatient, skip to 2:00 in the above video, where you can see 3
surfaces do some amazing things all by themselves (1)  They find the exact
midpoint between the 3 anchor points (2) they find the minimal distances,
and (3) they form identical angles.  You can't do this freehand, most people
can't even do it with a ruler and a compass in geometry class.  There are
even "the laws of (physicist) Joseph Plateau", to cover all the cases, and
they apply to a very impressive range of real-world physical items, as the
concept of "minimizing the energy" in a system is the difference between
something that is stable, and something that is inherently unstable. 

There's an entire book on what soap bubbles can teach us, written by the
famous British physicist, C. V. Boys:  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33370

Now, to get the entire shape of bee honeycomb cells in context, one is going
to have to work between 2 glass plates, and get 2 layers of equal bubbles,
as Weaire Phelan did, or you are going to have to slog through Lazlo Toth's
mathematical model.

But to claim that such structures are "built" or "made" rather than formed
by natural forces is exactly like claiming that a Hippo controls his
sphincter to produce artfully-crafted and deliberately perfect spherical
bubbles when he farts.  "No", says the 5-year-old, "it is just a hippo fart,
and the bubble is a sphere simply because bubbles form as spheres".
Five-year-olds will remember the hippo farts for their entire lives, and
now, so will you.

> “Somehow they heat the comb or 
> parts of the comb to an unknown 
> temperature.” 

This is what some people say, but I think it is more accurate to say that
temperature is not so important as it is to have a sufficiently thin wall of
wax,  one that the bees have chewed away at to the thinnest they can without
breaking through.  The wax has to be a "film".  Thin enough so that surface
tension can have an effect on its shape.  Sure, it needs to be warm for this
to happen, but I think we can measure temperatures with ease these days, and
I don’t think we need as much warmth as has been claimed.  	

> “Somehow they support and squash 
> the comb, maybe one cell at a time 
> or maybe  a group of cells or maybe 
> just one side of each cell at a 
> time…. etc etc.”

Nope, look at the videos, play with some soap bubbles and a straw on the
surface of some soapy water, and you can make this happen simply by making
bubbles ADJACENT.  The thing about surface tension is that the forces are
going to equalize out themselves with no pressure from the outside being
overtly applied.  The TENSION comes from the arrangement of the surfaces
themselves, and the "pressure" is the pressure exerted outwards against each
other by as little as one other bubble in contact with the first, all the
bubbles being under tension.   But when you have 3 bubbles, that's when the
fun begins, and things start to look more like honeycomb.

The forces at work are so well-understood, and so basic to our understanding
of the physical reality in which we live, that even the imperfections that
can arise under very special cases are well-understood and argued in
minutiae, as in here:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.2731

‎> When I see bees building comb from 
> scratch they are hanging in a sheet 
> with a leg stuck out above, below 
> and to the side, so as to hold onto 
> a neighbouring bee. 

That's festooning.  That's the young bees making wax from their wax glands.
Other bees, slightly older, take that wax, and build comb.

> Until someone, somehow, can 
> describe what is taking place 
> with certainty, we just have 
> theories don't we?    	

Some theories are far more supported by data than others.  Here we have
actual accepted "Laws" with proper and complete mathematical proofs, so even
those who want to dismiss all "theories" as inherently inferior can be
satisfied, or at least stared down.

I have been describing what happens with certainty to a very high degree.  

That I had to explain Plateau Laws and Taylor's proofs thereof, surface
tension, and so on is a problem I've noted before - some things are best
learned from very basic texts from other fields, rather than from beekeeping
books, as beekeepers tend to not be reliable sources of explanation for what
they think they see, and biologists, being mostly observational in their
approach, tend to not have sufficient grounding in the hard sciences.
(Biology gets and less soft all the time, but it is still a predominantly
soft science.)	

While it is not the case here, the debate/argument tactic of asking someone
to "Explain it to me as if I were a 5-year-old" is an old one, and tends to
be unfair,  as it demands far too much from questioned, while attempting to
legitimatize someone arguing from ignorance.  One should demand that they do
their own homework before arguing, so that they may argue from an educated
and informed stance.

There are lots of things that cannot be properly explained to 5-year-olds,
just as there are many things that simply cannot be completely explained to
adults lacking a solid grounding in math, such as dimensions beyond 3, and
some calculus. 

Here, we are talking about the forces that surround us and shape everything
we touch.  Challenges to the existence of these forces are as basic as
challenges to gravity, (something that is VERY hard to explain to a
5-year-old, go ahead and try).

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