Science warning: this post contains actual science. You have been warned...
Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #1 is called Henrietta. She is named after Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was an astronomer who changed the way we measure the size of the universe.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born in Massachusetts, and attended college in Ohio before transferring to Massachusetts' Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (later Radcliffe College). In her fourth year, she studied astronomy, as well as working as a 'computer' at the Harvard College Observatory where she measured and catalogued the brightness of stars from photographic plates.
After finishing college, Henrietta spent some time travelling in Europe before returning to the Harvard College Observatory in 1903. Working under director Edward Charles Pickering, Henrietta began studying variable stars (stars which oscillate between brighter and dimmer luminosity - also known as 'Cepheid variables') in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. She published her analysis of 1,777 variable stars in 1908, and found that brighter variables had a longer period - in other words, if the variable star is brighter, the length of time between maximum and minimum luminosity is longer.
Building on her earlier work, in 1912 Henrietta published a new paper based on a sample of 25 variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. In this new paper, Henrietta established that there was a direct relationship between a variable star's brightness and period. If you look at figure 2 on page 3 of the 1912 paper, there's a really nice graph showing the linear relationship between the magnitude and (logarithm of the) period of the stars, with the upper line showing the maximum brightness, and the lower line the minimum brightness.
Henrietta reasoned that, because all 25 stars in her sample were in the same galaxy, they were all roughly the same distance from Earth. This meant that the logarithm of the period was related to the intrinsic brightness of the star. Which further meant that, if you had two variable starts with the same period, but one appeared dimmer than the other from Earth, then the dimmer one must be further away, and the difference in distance would be directly related to the difference in brightness. There was only one problem - at the time, there was no method to determine the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud, and therefore no way to calibrate absolute distance based on Henrietta's 25 stars.
Fortunately, a year later, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung measured some much closer cepheid variables using the parallax method (basically a fancy version of Pythagoras's theorem, based on the earth's orbit). He was then able to use Henrietta's work to calculate the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud. (Oddly, his initial calculations had the Small Magellanic Cloud 10 times closer than it actually is, but the error was soon corrected).
Before Henrietta's work, the parallax method was the best available technique for measuring distance in the universe, but was only accurate up to a few hundred light years. Henrietta's ground-breaking analysis expanded the accurate measurement of astronomical distances up to about 20 million light years. She quite literally expanded the frontier of human understanding of the universe.
You can find out more about Henrietta Swan Leavitt here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt
Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Henrietta:
