INSTINCT 375 



opposed basins, but the work, from the unnatural state 

 of things, had not been neatly performed. The bees 

 must have worked at very nearly the same rate in circu- 

 larly gnawing away and deepening the basins on both 

 sides of the ridge of vermilion wax, in order to have 

 thus succeeded in leaving flat plates between the basins, 

 by stopping work at the planes of intersection. 



Considering how flexible thin wax is, I do not see 

 that there is any difficulty iu the bees, while at work on 

 the two sides of a strip of wax, perceiving when they 

 have gnawed the wax away to the proper thinness, and 

 then stopping their work. In ordinary combs it has ap- 

 peared to me that the bees do not always succeed in 

 working at exactly the same rate from the opposite sides; 

 for I have noticed half-completed rhombs at the base of 

 a just commenced cell, which were slightly concave on 

 one side, where I suppose that the bees had excavated 

 too quickly, and convex on the opposed side where the 

 bees had worked less quickly. In one well-marked in- 

 stance, I put the comb back into the hive, and allowed 

 the bees to go on working for a short time, and again 

 examined the cell, and I found that the rhombic plate 

 had been completed, and had become perfectly fiat: it was 

 absolutely impossible, from the extreme thinness of the 

 little plate, that they could have effected this by gnawing 

 away the convex side; and I suspect that the bees in 

 such cases stand on opposite sides and push and bend 

 the ductile and warm wax (which, as I have tried, is 

 easily done) into its proper intermediate plane and thus 

 flatten it. 



From the experiment of the ridge of vermilion wax 

 we can see that, if the bees were to build for themselves a 



