What are hexagonal plates?

Hexagonal plates are shapes that look like honeycombs, but flat and made of tiny pieces.

Imagine you have a cookie cutter shaped like a hexagon, that's a six-sided shape, like a stop sign. Now imagine you use this cookie cutter to cut out many small cookies from a big sheet of dough. Each cookie is a hexagonal plate. They’re all the same size and shape, just like the tiny cells in a beehive.

Bees make honeycombs using wax, each cell is a perfect little hexagon. Hexagonal plates are kind of like those honeycomb cells, but they're flat and not made of wax. You might find them in nature too, like when salt forms tiny, flat shapes under the sea.

Hexagons are super efficient, they fit together perfectly with no gaps. That’s why bees use them! When you stack hexagonal plates on top of each other, they make a strong and tidy structure, just like a honeycomb.