Honeycomb aligned. Thus, each cell has two vertically oriented walls, with the upper and lower parts of the cells composed of two angled walls. The open end of a cell is typically referred to as the top of the cell, while the opposite end is called the bottom. The cells slope slightly upwards, between 9 and 14°, towards the open ends. Two possible explanations exist as to why honeycomb is composed of hexagons, rather than any other shape. First, the hexagonal tiling creates a partition with equal-sized cells, while minimizing the total perimeter of the cells. Known in geometry as the
Order-6 hexagonal tiling honeycomb fundamental domain. It has an octahedral Coxeter diagram with 6 order-3 branches, and 3 infinite-order branches in the shape of a triangular prism, . It is one of 15 regular hyperbolic honeycombs in 3-space, 11 of which like this one are paracompact, with infinite cells or vertex figures. There are nine uniform honeycombs in the [6,3,6] Coxeter group family, including this regular form. It has a related alternation honeycomb, represented by ↔ , having alternating triangular tiling cells, and a regular form as , called a triangular tiling honeycomb. This honeycomb is a part of a sequence of polychora and