The Life of the Bee 
and to pass each other. At the moment 
when they begin to construct one of 
these strips at the top of the hive, the 
waxen wall (which is its rough model, and 
will later be thinned and extended) is still 
very thick, and completely excludes the 
fifty or sixty bees at work on its inner 
face from the fifty or sixty simultaneously 
engaged in carving the outer, so that it is 
wholly impossible for one group to see the 
other, unless indeed their sight be able to 
penetrate opaque matter. And yet there 
is not a hole that is scooped on the inner 
surface, not a fragment of wax that is 
added, but corresponds with mathematical 
precision to a protuberance or cavity on 
the outer surface, and vice versa. How 
does this happen? How is it that one 
does not dig too deep, another not deep 
enough? Whence the invariable magical 
coincidence between the angles of the 
lozenges? What is it tells the bees that 
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