The Life of the Bee 



and to pass each other. At the moment 

 when they begin to construct one of 

 these strips at the top of the hive, the 

 waxen wall (which is its rough model, and 

 will later be thinned and extended) is still 

 very thick, and completely excludes the 

 fifty or sixty bees at work on its inner 

 face from the fifty or sixty simultaneously 

 engaged in carving the outer, so that it is 

 wholly impossible for one group to see the 

 other, unless indeed their sight be able to 

 penetrate opaque matter. And yet there 

 is not a hole that is scooped on the inner 

 surface, not a fragment of wax that is 

 added, but corresponds with mathematical 

 precision to a protuberance or cavity on 

 the outer surface, and vice versa. How 

 does this happen ? How is it that one 

 does not dig too deep, another not deep 

 enough ? Whence the invariable magical 

 coincidence between the angles of the 

 lozenges ? What is it tells the bees that 



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