THE COMB-BUILDERS 217 
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 wfwards, 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 
tried to get upon it, with their wax-hods filled and 
ready, and each time failed: the ordinary way of 
comb-building was clearly impossible. Then the 
engineers of the hive, inspired by the difficulty, 
