220 SPECIAL INSTINCTS. Cuap. VII. 



former experiment, would liavc broken into eacli otlier from 

 the opposite sides. The bees, liowcver, did not sufl'er this to 

 happen, and they stopped their excavations in due time ; so 

 that the basins, as soon as they had been a little deepened, 

 came to have bottoms with flat sides ; and these flat sides, 

 formed by little thin plates of the vermilion wax left un- 

 p^nawed, were situated, as far as the eye could judge, exactly 

 along the planes of imaginary intersection between the basins 

 on tiie opposite sides of the ridge of wax. In some parts, only 

 small portions, in other parts, large portions of a rhombic jilate 

 had been left between the opposed basins ; but the work, from 

 the mmatural state of things, had not been neatly performed. 

 The bees must have worked at very nearly the same rate in 

 circularly gnawing away and deepening the basins on both 

 sides of the ridge of vennilion wax, in order to have thus suc- 

 ceeded in leaving flat plates between the basins, by stopping 

 work at the jilanes of intersection. 



Considering how flexible thin wax is, I do not see that 

 there is any dilficulty in 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 ordinarv combs it has appeared 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 instance, I jiut the 

 coml) back into the hive, and allowed the bees to go on work- 

 ing for a sliort time, and again examined the cell, and I found 

 that the rhombic plate had been completed, and had become 

 pcrfectli/ JJat : i^ was absolutely impossil)le, 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 ])roper intermediate plane, and thus flatten it. 



From the experiment of the ridge of vermilion wax we can 

 Bee that, if the bees were to build for themselves a thin wall 

 of wax, they could make their cells of the proper shape, by 

 standing at the proper distance from each other, by excavat- 

 ing at the same rate, and by endeavoring to make equal spheri- 

 cal hollows, but never allowing the s])hcres to break into each 



