324 PART V. WORKING STAGE. 



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, -^ of an inch in thickness ; whereas the basal rhomboidal plates 

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

 ness, from twenty-one measurements, of 229- 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 commencement 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 circum- 

 ferential rim of 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 from the walls of the % last completed cells, and then, by striking 

 imaginary spheres, they can build up a wall intermediate between two 

 adjoining spheres; but, as far as I have seen, they never gnaw away and 

 finish off the angles of a cell till a large part both of that cell and of 

 the adjoining cells has been buijt. This capacity in bees of laying down 

 under certain circumstances a rough wall in its proper place between 

 two just commenced cells, is important, as it bears on a fact, which seems 

 at first subversive of the foregoing theory; namely, that the cells on the 

 extreme margin of wasp-combs are sometimes strictly hexagonal ; but I 

 have not space here to enter on this subject. Nor does there seem to 

 me any great difficulty in a single insect (as in the case of a queen-wasp) 

 making hexagonal cells, if she were to work alternately on the inside 

 and outside of two or three cells commenced at the same time, always 

 standing at the proper relative distance from the parts of the cells just 

 begun, sweeping spheres or cylinders, and building up intermediate 

 planes. 



"As natural selection acts only by the accumulation of slight modifica- 

 tions of structure or instinct, each profitable to the individual under its 

 conditions of life, it may reasonably be asked, how a long and graduated 

 succession of modified architectural instingts, all tending towards the pre- 

 sent perfect plan of construction, could have profited the progenitors of 

 the hive-bee? I think the answer is not difficult: cells constructed like 

 those of the bee or the wasp gain in strength, and save much in labour 

 and space, and in the materials of which they are constructed. With 



