Auxetic cellular tubes are potential candidates for several engineering applications requiring resistance to bending due to the enormous demand for lightweight and high mechanical performance. Interestingly, we found that the preferential buckling mode can change the direction of deformation in the beam cross-section by applying negative Poisson's ratio cells in the lateral direction and is an effective modifying region. The bending response and energy absorption of multi-cellular tube with auxetic cells (Aux) and novel design tubes with auxetic and octagonal cells (AuxOcta) have been investigated with numerical and experimental systematically. These unique auxetic structures are produced by direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) with 316L stainless steel. The bending results show that the Aux tube indicates gradual local deformation in the loading region, while the cells of the AuxOcta tube beam are homogeneously deformed in the loading region. Moreover, AuxOcta structure is optimized to improve load-carrying and energy-absorbing capacities. This optimized AuxOcta structure (AuxOcta-G) offers superior bending performance from the test results. Compared to the Aux structure, the improvement in the specific load carrying (SLC) capacity of the AuxOcta-G structure above is 15% for 5 mm displacement, while the improvement in the specific energy absorption (SEA) approximately reaches 16%. The Finite Element Method (FEM) results showed that AuxOcta and AuxOcta-G structures offer a preferred behavior with a wide displacement range. This study provides a baseline for future investigation of hybrid beam design with a negative Poisson cross-section.