CELL-MAKING INSTINCT. 247 



bottoms of the basins, if they had been excavated to the 

 same depth as in the former experiment, would have broken 

 into each other from the opposite sides. The bees, however, 

 did not suffer this to happen, and they stopped their excava- 

 tions in due time ; so that the basins, as soon as they had 

 been a little deepened, came to have flat bases; and these 

 flat bases, formed by thin little plates of the vermilion wax 

 left ungnawed, were situated, as far as the eye could judge, 

 exactly along the planes of imaginary intersection between 

 the basins on the opposite side of the ridge of wax. In some 

 parts, only small portions, in other parts, large portions of a 

 rhombic plate were thus left between the opposed basins, 

 but the work, from the unnatural state of things, had not 

 been neatly performed. The bees must have worked at 

 very nearly the same rate in circularly gnawing away and 

 deepening the basins on both sides of the ridge of vermilion 

 wax, in order to have thus succeeded in leaving flat plates 

 between the basins, by stopping work at the planes of inter- 

 section. 



Considering how flexible thin wax is, I do not see that 

 there is any difficulty in the bees, while at work on the two 

 sides of a strip of wax, perceiving when they have gnawed 

 the wax away to the proper thinness, and then stopping 

 their work. In ordinary combs it has appeared to me that 

 the bees do not always succeed in working at exactly the 

 same rate from the opposite sides ; for I have noticed half- 

 completed rhombs at the base of a just commenced cell, 

 which were slightly concave on one side, where I suppose 

 that the bees had excavated too quickly, and convex on the 

 opposed side where the bees had worked less quickly. In 

 one well-marked instance, I put the comb back into the hive, 

 and allowed the bees to go on working for a short time, and 

 again examined the cell, and I found that the rhombic plate 

 had been completed, and had become perfectly flat : it was 

 absolutely impossible, from the extreme thinness of the little 

 plate, that they could have effected this by gnawing away 

 the convex side ; and I suspect that the bees in such cases 

 stand on opposite sides, and push and bend the ductile and 

 warm wax (which as I have tried is easily done) into its 

 proper intermediate plane, and thus flatten it. 



From the experiment of the ridge of vermilion wax we 

 can see that, if the bees were to build for themselves a 

 thin wall of wax, they could make their cells of the proper 

 ehape, by standing at the prooer distance from each other, 



