THE COMB-BUILDERS 197 



consider her as the designer and builder of honey- 

 comb. 



It is here that she shines in her most signifi- 

 cant light. The complicated structures with 

 which she fills the bee-city do not call for 

 unwearying toil alone : they could never have 

 been fashioned unless the combined arts of 

 engineer, architect, and mathematician had been 

 brought to bear on them. Nor are they merely 

 simple constructive and mathematical problems 

 which the honey-bee is called upon to face; 

 nor, though difficult, unvarying, and so amenable 

 to instinctive solution. In almost every comb 

 built we see special and necessarily unforeseen 

 difficulties met and triumphantly overcome. In 

 the construction of the six-sided cell, with its base 

 composed of three rhombs or diamonds, the bee 

 has adopted a form which our greatest arithme- 

 ticians admit to be the best possible for her re- 

 quirements, and she endeavours to keep to this 

 form wherever practicable. But it constantly 

 happens, in her work of comb-building, that local 

 conditions interfere with her plans ; and then she 

 will make five-sided cells, or square cells, or tri- 

 angular, or any other form, just as the need impels 

 her. It is a facile, comfortably finite thing to put 

 all this down to a mysterious essence called 

 instinct, with which the organism of the bee has 

 been divinely dosed, as men serve electricity to a 

 leyden-jar. But it was not instinct that made 



