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Langenstroth invented a way of making moveable frames made out of wood, which fit inside the wooden boxes we commonly think of beehives, and can be removed to inspect the bees or to harvest the honey.

When most people think of natural style beehives, they think of a sort of half-oval structure that is in a niche. That's actually a skep, also man made for man's convenience, typically of straw. Old fashioned.

In fact, bees in the wild build their hives in holes in trees, and crotches of trees, and inside walls of houses, and hollow logs. Inside a hole with walls, essentially.

And a wild bee hive consists of parallel rows of double sided wax structures exactly like the photo you posted only following the configuration of the natural structure.

Langenstroth, an eccentric genius, noticed the regularity with which bees do everything. The size of the cells is quite regular, for example, and so is the space between the combs, and as you can see in the photo, the combs always line up back to back offset so that the strongest part of one side is on the weakest side of the other.

Is that design? No more than a bird nest. Is a bird nest an example of design?

Is it an example of free will? No more than salmon swimming upstream to spawn at the place of their birth.

I never did understand the intelligent design argument, by the way. Are they arguing that human beings are Clockwork Oranges? Are they all Calvinists arguing predestination? Do they not believe in free will?

Is that design? No more than a bird nest. Is a bird nest an example of design?

Oddly, I thought about posting a bird's nest, but couldn't locate a good image of what I wanted - there are some South American birds that build really spectacularly complicated nests.

Anyway, whether it fits the notion of "design" or not, it's pretty clearly not intelligently designed, given what we know about bees. Which leads to the question of whether or not "mindless" forces can produce emergent structures in the universe that appear to be designed, much as "mindless" bees can produce emergent structures that appear to be designed.

Interesting. Hopefully we'll get a nice counterpoint from some of FR's resident ID proponents, since you're asking questions that I really can't answer from an ID perspective ;)