How bees and foams respond to curved confinement: level set boundary representations in the Surface Evolver

We present a Surface Evolver framework for simulating single bubbles and multicellular foams trapped between curved parallel surfaces. We are able to explore a range of geometries using level set constraints to model the bounding surfaces. Unlike previous work, in which the bounding surfaces are flat (the so called Hele-Shaw geometry), we consider surfaces with non- vanishing Gaussian curvature, specifically the sphere, the torus and the Schwarz Primitive-surface. In the case of multi-cellular foams - our method is to first distribute a set of N points evenly over the surface (using an en- ergy minimisation approach), these seed points are then used to generate a Voronoi partition, that is clipped to the confining space, which in turn forms the basis of a Surface Evolver simulation. In addition we describe our ex- perimental attempt to generate a honeycomb on a negatively curved surface, by trapping bees between two Schwarz Primitive-surfaces. Our aim is to understand how bees adapt the usual hexagonal motif of the honeycomb to cope with a curved surface. To our knowledge this is the first time that an attempt has been made to realise a biological cellular structure of this type.

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