The Busy Bee. 199 



that would most economically end a hexagonal prism 

 differed from Maraldi's measurements by 2 minutes of 

 a degree. Worried about it, he worked until he found a 

 printer's error in his table of logarithms that had led him 

 astray by just so much. Whereupon Lord Brougham 

 threw up his hands and clucked his astonishment that the 

 hive-bee should have solved a most recondite mathe- 

 matical problem so absolutely that it corrected a standard 

 book of reference. And how wonderful the bee is, and 

 what a lesson this should be to us, and so on and so on. 



What nonsense! An error of 2 minutes in a degree! 

 Maraldi was the one that made it, cf course, for that 

 means a divergence so small that two lines forming this 

 angle would travel 144 feet before separating one inch. 

 Listen. The wax in a comb is as thin as the bees work- 

 ing in it can scrape it without making holes in it. Blow 

 a soap bubble. As it floats in the air it is a globe whicn 

 has the greatest possible content in proportion to its 

 envelope. Put it on a plate, and if it doesn't burst the 

 bottom is flat. Surround it with six other bubbles. The 

 equal tension of the meeting films will make the central 

 bubble a hexagon, just as the equal tension of the thin 

 wax with the bees working in it and pressing against 

 each other makes it a hexagon. Oh, the marvelous 

 geometry of the honey-bee! Oh, the profound mathe- 

 matics of soapsuds! 



If Lord Brougham had only used his eyes, he would 

 have seen that the outer cells of the honeycomb are cylin- 

 drical, just as the outer bubbles of a mass of froth are 

 globular. Besides, worker-cells and drone-cells are not 

 of the same diameter, to say nothing of the pear-shaped 

 queen cells, so a comb couldn't be mathematically exact. 

 Almost every cell in a honeycomb is out of a true hexa- 

 gon by at least three or four degrees. Falsehood, willful 



