I don't think that doing the hexagons ALL around the sphere is possible...

I'm not too sure at the moment about exactly how the geometry fits together, but you can make an IcoSphere with triangles, or maybe pentagons. Anything with a higher edge count is out of the question.

Or then again, you can texture map that onto a sphere, after (probably should check out that link render posted last) you run some calculations on the texture image to stretch out the 2 ends of it, so it texture maps perfectly, like they have those world maps stretched out at the top and bottom!

P.