VII 



OF THE BEE'S CELL 539 



cells, with an insignificant difference in the various diameters, and 

 ■a mean of 6-9 for the drone-cells, with their horizontal diameter some- 

 what in excess, and averaging 7-1 mm. A curious attempt has been 

 made of late years by Italian bee-keepers to let the bees work on 

 a larger foundation, and so induce them to build larger cells; and 

 some, but by no means all, assert that the young bees reared in the 

 larger cells are themselves of larger stature*. 



That the beautiful regularity of the bee's architecture is due to 

 some automatic play of the physical forces, and that it were 

 fantastic to assume (with Pappus and Reaumur) that the bee 

 intentionally seeks for a method of economising wax, is certain; 

 but the precise manner of this automatic action is not so clear. 

 When the hive-bee builds a solitary cell, or a small cluster of cells, 

 as it does for those eggs which are to develop into queens, it makes 

 but a rude construction. The queen-cells are lumps of coarse wax 

 hollowed out and roughly bitten into shape, bearing the marks of 

 the bee's jaws like the marks of a blunt adze on a rough-hewn log. 



Omitting the simplest of all cases, when (among some humble- 

 bees) the old cocoons are used to hold honey, the cells built by the 

 "solitary" wasps and bees are of various kinds. They may be 

 formed by partitioning off little chambers in a hollow stem; they 

 may be rounded or oval capsules, often very neatly constructed 

 out of mud or vegetable fibre or httle stones, agglutinated together 

 with a salivary glue; but they shew, except for their rounded or 

 tubular form, no mathematical symmetry. The social wasps and 

 many bees build, usually out of vegetable matter chewed into a 

 paste with saliva, very beautiful nests of '"combs"; and the close- 

 set papery cells which constitute these combs are just as regularly 

 hexagonal as are the waxen cells of the hive-bee. But in these cases 

 (or nearly all of them) the cells are in a single row ; their sides are 

 regularly hexagonal, but their ends, for want of opponent forces, 

 remain simply spherical. 



In Melipona domestica (of which Darwin epitomises Pierre Huber's 

 description) "the large waxen honey-cells are nearly spherical, 

 nearly equal in size, and are aggregated into an irregular mass." 



* Cf. (int. al.) H. Gontarsi, >Sammelleistungen von Bienen aus vergrosserten 

 Brutzellen, Arch.f. Bienenkunde, xvi, p. 7, 1935; A. Ghetti, Celli ed api piu grandi, 

 IV Congresso nazion. della S.A.I. 1935. 



