Venus and Naturally Occurring Hexagons

Last week I posted this video about Venus and its manifestations. The topic is way too interesting and vast, so I thought I’d do a little spin-off, more precisely, I’d like to expand a bit on naturally-occurring hexagon shapes, given that Venus manifests number six and said-hexagons.

Snowflakes can be seen as an artistic collaboration between the water element (Venus) and the air element (Saturn). The water molecules within snowflakes are arranged in a hexagonal, Venusian manner, which is uniform throughout any individual snow crystal. 

Soap Bubbles When two bubbles meet, they can reduce the total (internal + external) perimeter of this nascent cluster by sharing an edge. The least-perimeter way to fill the plane with bubbles of equal area is to tile it with regular hexagons. Venus loves win-win situations, and this is a win-win situation between the bubble dimensions and the space they occupy.

Pineapples - I like this example more so because pineapples are acid fruit and Venus causes the sour (acid) taste. Ripe pineapples are an example of healthy taste. And guess what, out of the five senses, Venus manifests taste as well :) The second photo below (an illustration from the book Therapeutic Use of Medicinal Plants and Their Extracts: Volume 1: Pharmacognosy by A.N.M. Alamgir) shows how Fibonacci structures occur on pineapples - and these types of structures maximize the plants' exposure to dew, as Leonardo da Vinci first observed. Current interpretations agree with this statement, adding that these patterns also improve exposure to sunlight and rainfall. Thomas Koshy in his book Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers with Applications

Bee eyes & Beehives

What makes beehives stand out from the other shapes above is that they are something manufactured by living beings. The beehive, an illustration of the perfect, most practical use of space is of course built in hexagonal shapes.

That is not surprising if we remember Venus is responsible for making practical choices. We can also say the bees are having a perfect relationship with their space by creating their beehives. This efficiency is due to something called tessellation of certain shapes, meaning they can be repeated across a surface without leaving gaps or overlapping.  

It appears that bees themselves are born with the hexagon imprinted onto them, as their eyes are of hexagonal shape.
​
The first time artist Rose-Lynn Fisher (who took the second photo above) looked at a bee’s eye magnified 10x to 500x in an electron microscope, she was amazed to see a field of hexagons, just like honeycomb. “I wondered, is this a coincidence or a clue?,” notes Fisher. “ Is it simply that hexagons are ubiquitous in nature, or is there a deeper correspondence between the structure of the bee’s vision and the structure she builds - in other words, similar frequencies being expressed in similar form?” This got Fisher wondering if there exists a parallel kind of encoding relevant to humanity. “At a refined level of our own nature, does our deeper capacity to see and to do correspond with an intrinsic structuring?” (source here)

Saturn's Hexagon

A very out-of-this-world naturally-occurring hexagon is the one formed on the surface of Saturn.

Scientists have discovered (on Saturn's North Pole) this shape whose sides are each six times bigger than Earth. According to Wikipedia, one hypothesis developed at Oxford University suggests that the hexagon forms where there is a steep latitudinal gradient in the speed of the atmospheric winds in Saturn's atmosphere.

To me, it sort of makes sense that Saturn would be crowned by a hexagon since its exaltation is in Libra, one of Venus’s own signs. It’s very interesting that the hexagon looked sapphire-blue, the color traditionally assigned to Saturn. Even though in the past five years, part of the giant weather system changed from turquoise to yellow, the photos taken by Cassimi show its 1,800-mile-wide central vortex (about the length of the US East Coast) has kept a rich blue color.

So I hope you enjoyed reading about these practical, naturally-occurring applications of the hexagonal shape manifested by Venus and, why not, come up with some cool examples as well!