THE COMB-BUILDERS 197 
consider her as the designer and builder of honey- 
comb, 
It is here that she shines in her most significant 
light. The complicated structures with which she 
fills the bee-city do not call for unwearying toil 
alone, like the works of coral insects: 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- 
ticilans 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 
