[fredley]

> They have been selected, by humans, to build flat sheets

What? The flat sheets are nothing to do with selection. They are to do with leveraging 'bee space' in the design of hives. Man-made hives include sheets of scaffold at very specific distances to ensure that bees build flat comb. The reason for doing this is easy inspection and management of the hive.

They are constrained to do this by leveraging bee space, it is not an evolved feature of commercial bees.

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/bsp.html

[afandian]

I'm not making any assertions, but don't you think there's some kind of selective process at work when you're breeding bees in an environment with fixed frames? Like, can they sustain a cluster over winter within the parameters?

[vanderZwan]

Surely that would produce selection pressure for favoring bees that naturally follow those constraints over those that ignore them though?

Also, assuming his observations are valid, how else would you explain the differences between wild and commercial bees?

[Lhiw]

Can't you both be right?

They're trained into making flat sheets and then lose the ability or instinct to make non flat sheets?