THE HONEY-BEE 41 



to work independently at the building of the 

 comb. No bee or group of bees works at one 

 cell or group of cells ; always fresh workers are 

 coming and fastening their mite of wax to one 

 or the other part of the comb. All seems 

 unorganised, undirected, confused and without 

 guidance. There is no foreman builder, there 

 is no experience for many of the builders have 

 scarcely emerged from the pupa stage for three 

 days, there is no means even of seeing for the 

 inside of a hive is pitch dark. Yet the bees 

 produce with machine-like rapidity and mathe- 

 matical accuracy a cell so uniform in size that 

 " au moment de Fetablissement du systeme 

 decimal, lorsqu'on chercha dans la nature une 

 mesure fixe qui pftt servir de point de depart et 

 d'etalon incontestable, Reaumur proposa 1'alveole 

 de 1'abeille."* 



Bees and wasps also have learned that to 

 obtain most space with the use of least material 

 and consequently less labour, the columnar cells 

 should be six-sided in cross-section. The vertical 

 comb of bees consists of two layers of cells back 

 to back. The bottom of each cell is a three- 



* Maeterlinck, " La Vie des Abeilles," p. 134. 



