The Busy Bee. 197 



building. Wax costs fifteen times its weight in honey, 

 and the bees make it go as far as possible. One pound 

 of beeswax will enclose about thirty-five thousand honey 

 cells. To save them all the bother he can, the modern 

 bee-keeper supplies his bees with the midrib or founda- 

 tion, on each side of which they build cells about half an 

 inch deep and about one-fifth of an inch in diameter. 

 The foundations are sheets of wax run through rollers 

 that stamp them with pyramidal indentations. One cell 



Fig. 39. Drone-comb. Worker-comb. 



does not back square up against another. If you stick 

 needles through the three facets that make the pyramidal 

 indentation in the back of a cell, they will come out in 

 three cells on the other side. That distributes the weight 

 of the honey better. 



One of the strange things about us human beings is 

 that we cannot seem to get it into our heads that the 

 truth is more delightful than any kind of a story that we 

 can make up. Here is the bee making six-sided honey 

 cells each one bottomed with three diamond-shaped 

 facets. To fill a space with boxes that would fit together 

 snugly the boxes would have to be triangles, squares, or 

 hexagons. Of these the hexagon contains the most in 

 proportion to the material used in making the box. The 

 Romanticists (for there are Romanticists and Realists in 

 science, as in everything else) are half a mind that the 

 bees figured all this out themselves by their own wisdom, 



