16 
sketch of the history of a bee community from the time 
of the renewal of active life in Spring, till the abdication 
of the queen-bee in anticipation of her successor’s birth, 
and the colonising flight of the faithful emigrant-swarm 
following her lead. The subsequent career of the 
remnant left in charge of the old hive and of the rising 
generation—their nephews and nieces—just born, or 
coming to birth out of the brood cells, was next detailed, 
the special points of interest being (i.) The young queen’s 
destruction of her natural rivals, the sister princesses, 
still dormant in the royal cells ; (ii.) The marriage flight; 
(iii.) The career of the drones and their final massacre; 
and (iv.) The winter-sleep. Returning to the story of 
the emigrant swarm, the lecturer touched briefly on 
possible contingencies in the absence of the bee-keeper 
and then went on to describe the procedure of the colony 
when once it gets itself safely lodged in the comfortable 
hive provided for it by its captain of industry, the honey- 
grabbing man. The clustering of the bees with the 
wax-makers in their centre, the deposition of the flat 
cakes of wax hanging from the roof, and the final archi- 
tectural achievement of excavating and building up the 
honeycombs, all this was described in detail. A magni- 
fied model of the honeycomb made of separate cells, 
fitting together in two layers, was then shown, and the 
advantages of the form for maximum stability and 
economy of wax being noted, the lecturer stated as the 
central object of her discourse, the investigation of the 
problem how far does the geometrical nature of things 
co-operate with the social intelligence of the bee in 
producing this ideally perfect cell-structure. It was 
shown (i.) That if a space is filled as closely as possible 
with deformable spheres which are then squeezed to- 
gether uniformly until no interstices are left, each sphere 
becomes a twelve-faced solid with rhombic faces, eight of 
whose fourteen vertices are of the same shape as the end 
of a bee-cell; (ii.) If, therefore, two layers of cylinders 
