## Distances in a bee's honeycomb

### Problem 354

Published on Sunday, 16th October 2011, 07:00 am; Solved by 236

Consider a honey bee's honeycomb where each cell is a perfect regular hexagon with side length 1.

One particular cell is occupied by the queen bee.
For a positive real number L, let B(L) count the cells with distance L from the queen bee cell (all distances are measured from centre to centre); you may assume that the honeycomb is large enough to accommodate for any distance we wish to consider.
For example, B(3) = 6, B(21) = 12 and B(111 111 111) = 54.

Find the number of L 5·1011 such that B(L) = 450.