THE COMB-BUILDERS 217 



them with sufficient base for their height. If 

 American engineers had at their disposal a material 

 of adequate tensile strength, and there were any- 

 thing in nature to hang them from, it would be, 

 scientifically, a better plan to suspend these build- 

 ings than to erect them, because the house would 

 then naturally tend to keep its verticality, and the 

 base-problem would cease to exist. On the same 

 principle the bees, having at hand a material of 

 almost ideal tensility, and a suitable hanging-beam, 

 wisely suspend their heavily, weighted combs from 

 the roof, instead of erecting them, like certain 

 kinds of ant-structures. 



But it is undoubtedly long racial experience, 

 and not inability to follow the humanly approved 

 method, that guides them here. Rarely — so rarely 

 that the writer, in the course of many years spent 

 among bees, has seen only a single example of it 

 — bees will build comb upwards, if circumstances 

 will allow no other way. And this would seem 

 not only to drive the last coffin-nail for the poor 

 instinct-theory, but to carve its epitaph as well. 



In the instance referred to, a glass-bottomed box 

 had been inverted over the feed-hole of a common 

 hive, and had there remained forgotten. As the 

 season progressed, the hive grew great with bees 

 and honey, and it became imperative to build 

 additional store-comb in the box overhead. But 

 its slippery glass roof would give no foothold to 

 the builders. Time and again they must have 



