21 SPECIAL INSTINCTS. [CHAP. VIIZ. 



and then to begin cutting it away equally on both sides near the 

 giound, 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 without 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 measurements made near the border of the comb, 3 ^r of 

 an inch in thickness; whereas the basal rhomboidal plates are 

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

 thickness, from twenty-one measurements, of -^1-^ of 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 work 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 com- 

 mencement of the first cell. I was able practically to show this 

 fact, by covering the edges of the hexagonal walls of a single cell, 

 or the extreme margin of the circumferential rim of a growing 

 comb, with an extremely thin layer of melted vermilion wax ; and 

 I invariably found that the colour was most delicately diffused by 

 the bees as delicately as a painter could have done it with his 

 brush by atoms of the coloured wax having been taken from the 

 spot on which it had been placed, and worked into the growing 

 edges of the cells all round. The work of construction seems to 

 be a sort of balance struck between many bees, all instinctively 

 standing at the same relative distance from each other, all trying 

 to sweep equal spheres, and then building up, or leaving ungnawed, 

 the planes of intersection between these spheres. It was really 

 curious to note in cases of difficulty, as when two pieces of comb 

 met at an angle, how often the bees would pull down and rebuild 

 in different ways the same cell, sometimes recurring to a shape 

 which they had at first rejected. 



When bees have a place on which they can stand in their proper 

 positions for working, for instance, on a slip of wood, placed 

 directly under the middle of a comb growing downwards, so that 

 the comb has to be built over one face of the slip in this case the 

 bees can lay the foundations of one wall of a new hexagon, in its 

 strictly proper place, projecting beyond the other completed cells. 

 It suffices that the bees should be enabled to stand at their proper 

 relative distances from each other and trom the walls of the last 

 somyleted cells, and then, by striking imaginary spheres, they can 



