208 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



the bees can cluster and crawl over the comb without 

 injuring the delicate hexagonal walls, which are only 

 about one four-hundredth of an inch in thickness ; the 

 plates of the pyramidal basis being about twice as 

 thick. By this singular manner of building, strength 

 is continually given to the comb, with the utmost 

 ultimate economy of wax. 



It seems at first to add to the difficulty of under- 

 standing how the cells are made, that a multitude of 

 bees all work together ; one bee after working a short 

 time at one cell going to another, so that, as Huber 

 has stated, a score of individuals work even at the 

 commencement of the first cell. I was able practically 

 to show this fact, by covering the edges of the 

 hexagonal walls of a single cell, or the extreme margin 

 of the circumferential rim of a growing comb, with an 

 extremely thin layer of melted vermilion wax ; and I 

 invariably found that the colour was most delicately 

 diffused by the bees — as delicately as a painter could 

 have done with his brush — by atoms of the coloured 

 wax having been taken from the spot on which it had 

 been placed, and worked into the growing edges of the 

 cells all round. The work of construction seems to be 

 a sort of balance struck between many bees, all in- 

 stinctively standing at the same relative distance from 

 each other, all trying to sweep equal spheres, and then 

 building up, or leaving ungnawed, the planes of inter- 

 section between these spheres. It was really curious 

 to note in cases of difficulty, as when two pieces of 

 comb met at an angle, how often the bees would pull 

 down and rebuild in different ways the same cell, 

 sometimes recurring to a shape which they had at first 

 rejected. 



When bees have a place on which they can stand in 

 their proper positions for working, — for instance, on a 

 slip of wood, placed directly under the middle of a 

 comb growing downwards so that the comb has to be 

 built over one face of the slip — in this case the bees 

 can lay the foundations of one wall of a new hexagon, 

 in its strictly proper place, projecting beyond the other 



