Chap. VII. CELLS OF THE HIVE-BEE. 229 



time ; so that the basins, as soon as they had been a 

 little deepened, came to have flat bottoms ; and these flat 

 bottoms, formed by thin little plates of the vermilion 

 wax having been left ungnawed, were situated, as far 

 as the eye could judge, exactly along the planes of 

 imaginary intersection between the basins on the op- 

 posite sides of the ridge of wax. In parts, only little 

 bits, in other parts, large portions of a rhombic plate 

 had been left between the opposed basins, but the work, 

 from the unnatural state of things, had not been neatly 

 performed. The bees must have worked at very nearly 

 the same rate on the opposite sides of the ridge of ver- 

 milion wax, as they circularly gnawed away and deep- 

 ened the basins on both sides, in order to have succeeded 

 in thus leaving flat plates between the basins, by 

 stopping work along the intermediate planes or planes 

 of intersection. 



Considering how flexible thin wax is, I do not see 

 that there is any difficulty in the bees, whilst at work on 

 the two sides of a strip of wax, perceiving when they 

 have gnawed the wax away to the proper thinness, 

 and then stopping their work. In ordinary combs it 

 has appeared to me that the bees do not always succeed 

 in working at exactly the same rate from the opposite 

 sides ; for I have noticed half-completed rhombs at the 

 base of a just-commenced cell, which were slightly con- 

 cave on one side, where I suppose that the bees had ex- 

 cavated too quickly, and convex on the opposed side, 

 where the bees had worked less quickly. In one well- 

 marked instance, I put the comb back into the hive, and 

 allowed the bees to go on working for a short time, and 

 again examined the cell, and I found that the rhombic 

 plate had been completed, and had become perfectly fiat : 

 it was absolutely impossible, from the extreme thinness 

 of the little rhombic plate, that they could have effected 



