33 
entered the hive she would immediately have laid eggs, and the bees would then have 
remained. He believed that bees somehow or other decided beforehand upon the place 
of which, on swarming, they would take possession ; it was difficult otherwise to account 
for the perfectly straight and rapid flight of a swarm to a window or other suitable 
spot, such selected spot being aften at the distance of a mile or two from their starting 
point. His view was that the swarm carried the queen, and not that the queen led 
the swarm. 
Mr. Tegetmeier also exhibited a number of pieces of comb of the honey-bee 
showing singular formations of cells; the specimens had been picked out of heaps of 
old combs, and were not the result of special experiment or of artificial manufacture. 
One piece of comb contained a row of sixteen central (not marginal) cells which were 
pentagonal, two of the angles being right angles; a second piece contained a group of 
cells, some pentagons, some hexagons, of various degrees of irregularity, in the middle 
of a mass of the regular hexagonal form; a dependent piece of old comb had had 
formed on its edge a number of shallow cells which were nearly hemispherical cups, 
and which gradually ran into the hexagonal shape where they came in contact with 
the regular cells of the old comb; other pieces contained cells which appeared to be 
circular-cylindrical ; and a specimen of comb containing three queen-cells had on each 
of those cells a number of hemispherical excavations. Mr. Tegetmeier was of opinion 
that the cell of the hive-bee was invariably hemispherical at its commencement, and a 
section of a cell which was not in contact with other cells was always circular; hemi- 
spherical cups or depressions were hollowed out, these excavations were made near to 
one another, almost in contact, and the bees enlarged them until they came in contact ; 
the enlargement being continued to the full extent possible (or, in other words, the 
bees gnawing away all the material so far as was cunsistent with the integrity of the 
comb), the cells of necessity assumed the hexagonal form. He did not believe that 
the pressure of contiguous cells upon each other had anything to do with the form of 
the cell, nor did he believe in the existence of a “ hexagonal instinct” or “ geometrical 
instinct” in the bee; the hexagonal*form was a consequence of the property of space 
that, of seven circles of equal radii, six will just surround the seventh; if it had been 
the case in nature that seven circles would just surround another of equal radius, then 
the cells of bees, when in contact, would have been heptagoual, instead of hexagonal. 
Mr. F. Smith remarked that Mr. Tegetmeier’s observation that a cell was invariably 
commenced as a hemisphere, if true of the hive-bee, was not true of all wasps, those, 
e.g., which built dependent nests, starting from a flat or plane base. 
Mr. F. Smith read the following account, supplied by Mr. S. Stone, of Bright- 
hampton, of the manner in which that gentleman had induced a colony of wasps to 
construct the series of six nests, of extruordinary shapes, which were exhibited at the 
previous Meeting of the Society :— 
¥ 
“ About the middle of the month of August, 1862, a large nest of Vespa germanica 
was taken by a person residing at Stanlake, a village adjoining Brighthampton. It 
was brought home by him, tied up in a handkerchief, and deposited for the night in a 
room in his house. In the morning word was sent me that if I could go down and 
fetch it away I might have it. Now it so happened that I could not go that day or the 
next, so it was allowed to remain where it was; but, as might have been expected, the 
insects very soon found their way through the handkerchief in which the nest was 
enclosed, completely riddling it, when a second was tied round it, which of course soon 
F 
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