Biological Illustrations of Fibonacci Sequences

Many interesting accounts have been written of the ways in which Fibonacci numbers keep cropping up in biological situations. We began the last chapter with the development of a rabbit colony, admittedly rather an artificial example. The ancestry of a male bee has been described in Professor F.W. Land, The Language of Mathematics. Here is the drone’s family tree, taking into account that he comes from an unfertilised egg of a queen bee: Successive generations of ancestors follow the Fibonacci sequence; this assumes, however, that all queens in the ancestry are distinct, which is not necessarily true.