WAX-WORKERS 145 



separately, and then a number of them were brought 

 together, under equal pressure they would form 

 hexagons ; but they are not made separately, but 

 are built in mass, and every part of the walls of 

 one cell forms part of the wall of a neighbouring 

 cell. This is even so with the base of the cell, 

 which forms part of the base of three other cells 

 on the other side of the comb. To human artificers 

 the task would necessitate a resort to mathematics, 

 but the worker bee issues from the chrysalis fully 

 competent to undertake the task without swallow- 

 ing the books of Euclid, and without even parental 

 instruction. Pure " rule of thumb " practice, but 

 even so the mathematicians have failed to find 

 any flaw in its results ; indeed, there is a well- 

 known record of a mathematician's work being 

 corrected in a sense by the bees. 



Maraldi, a famous mathematician in the early 

 part of the eighteenth century, took an interest 

 in bees, and invented a glass hive in order to observe 

 them at work. He found that the bottoms of the 

 cells formed an inverted pyramid and that they 

 were hexagonal like the walls, but formed of three 

 lozenge-shaped plates. His mathematical mind 

 was curious to know if the bees were mathematicians 

 also, so accurate did the work appear to the eye. 

 So with great care he measured the angles of these 

 lozenges, and found that the greater angles were 

 109 28', and the lesser ones 70 32'. 



Reaumur, who knew of Maraldi's calculations, 

 and suspected that such precision on the part of 

 10 



