92 THE BUILDING OF BEEs. 
206. “If we examine the bees closely during the season of 
comb-building and honey-gathering, we shall find many of them 
with the wax scales protruding between the rings that form the 
body, and these scales are either picked from their bodies, or 
from the bottom of the hive or honey boxes in which they are 
building. If a bee is obliged to carry one of these wax scales 
but ashort distance, he takes it in his mandibles, and looks as 
business-like with it thus, as a carpenter with a board on his 
shoulder. If he has to carry it from the bottom of the honey box, 
he takes it in a way that I cannot explain any better than to say 
he slips it under his chin, in the mandibles or jaws. When thus 
equipped, you would never know he was encumbered with any- 
thing, unless it chanced to slip out, when he will very dextrously 
tuck it back with one of his forefeet. The little plate of wax 
Fig. 37. Fig. 38. 
is so warm, from being kept under his chin, as to be quite soft 
when it gets back; and as he takes it out, and gives it a pinch 
against the comb where the building is going on, one would 
think he might stop a while and put it into place; but not he; 
for off he scampers and twists around so many different ways, 
you might think he was not one of the working kind at all. An- 
other follows after him sooner or later, and gives the wax a pinch, 
or a little scraping or burnishing with his polished mandibles, 
then another, and so on, and the sum total of all these manceu- 
vres is that the comb seems almost to grow out of nothing; yet 
no bee ever makes a cell himself, and no comb building is ever 
done by any bee while standing in a cell; neither do the bees ever 
stand in rows and ‘excavate,‘ or any thing of the hind.” 
