CELL-MAKING INSTINCT. 2G5 



specimens showing clearly that they can do this. Even 

 in the rude circumferential rim or wall of wax round a 

 growing comb, flexures may sometimes be observed, cor- 

 responding in position to the planes of the rhombic basal 

 plates of future cells. But the rough wall of wax has in 

 every case to be finished off, by being largely gnawed away 

 on both sides. The manner in which the bees build is 

 curious; they always make the first rough wall from ten to 

 twenty times thicker than the excessively thin finished wall 

 of the cell, which will ultimately be left. We shall under- 

 stand how they work, by supposing masons first to pile up 

 a broad ridge of cement, and then to begin cutting it away 

 equally on both sides near the ground, till a smooth, very 

 thin wall is left in the middle; the masons always piling 

 up the cut away cement, and adding fresh cement on the 

 summit of the ridge. We shall thus have a thin wall 

 steadily growing upward but always crowned by a gigantic 

 coping. From all the cells, both those just commenced 

 and those completed, being thus crowned by a strong coping 

 of wax, the bees can cluster and crawl over the comb with- 

 out injuring the delicate hexagonal walls. These walls, as 

 Professor Miller has kindly ascertained for me, vary greatly 

 in thickness; being, on an average of twelve measure- 

 ments made near the border of the comb, -g^ of an 

 inch in thickness; whereas the basal rhomboiclal j^lates are 

 thicker, nearly in the proportion of three to two, having a 

 mean thickness, from twenty-one measurements, of -^Ij ^^ 

 an inch. By the above singular manner of building, 

 strength is continually given to the comb, with the utmost 

 ultimate economy of wax. 



It seems at first to add to the difficulty of understanding 

 how the cells are made, that a multitude of bees all woik 

 together; one bee after working a short time at one cell 

 going to another, so that, as Huber has stated, a score of 

 individuals work even at the commencement of the fir.^t 

 cell. I was able practically to show this fact, by covering 

 the edges of the hexagonal walls of a sing-le cell, or the ex- 

 treme margin of the circumferential rim of a growing 

 comb, with an extremely thin layer of melted vermilion 

 wax; and I invariably found that the color was most deli- 

 cately diffused by the bees — as delicately as a painter could 

 have done it with his brush— by atoms of the colored wax 



