APIARI^E. 123 



selves of such adventitious aid. Must we not henceforth, 

 when speaking of the marvels of the hive or the vespiary, erase 

 from our vocabulary such terms as blind instinct ; and must we 

 not cease to stigmatize the bee as a mere machine?" 



At the meeting of the same society held Feb. 1, 1864, Mr. 

 F. Smith exhibited a collection of Wasps' nests, one of Vespa 

 rufa, the rest of V. vulgaris; they were in various stages of 

 formation, the earliest consisting of only a single cup contain^ 

 ing the first egg, others consisting of three or four cups, whilst 

 others again were more complete. The whole had been arti- 

 ficially obtained by Mr. Stone, who tempted the wasps to build 

 by excavating holes in banks and furnishing them with foot- 

 stalks ; in fact, Mr. Stone appeared to possess the power of 

 inducing wasps to build nests of almost any shape he 

 pleased. 



But to return to the cell of the Bee. It should first be 

 proved that the cells are not exactly and mathematically per- 

 fect hexagons, though sufficiently so for the purpose for which 

 they are used. In the Proceedings of the American Academy 

 of Arts and Sciences, vol. vii, 1866, Professor Wyman has, by 

 a most careful as well as novel and ingenious mode of investiga- 

 tion, proved that the cells are all more or less imperfect, and 

 that a hexagonal cell mathematically exact, does not exist in 

 nature, but only in theory. 



The form of the cell is liable to marked variations, chief 

 among which the following may be mentioned, in the author's 

 own words : 



"1. The diameters of workers' cells may so vary, that ten 

 of them may have an aggregate deviation from the normal 

 quantity equal to the diameter of a cell. The average varia- 

 tion is a little less than one half that amount, namely, nearly 

 0.10 inch, in the same number of cells. 



' ; 2. The width of the sides varies, and this generally in- 

 volves a variation of the angles which adjoining sides make 

 with each other, since the sides vary not only in length but in 

 direction. 



"3. The variation in the diameters does not depend upon 

 accidental distortion, but upon the manner in which the cell 

 was built. 



