350 SPECIAL INSTINCTS. [Chap. VIII. 



by a strong coping of wax, the bees can cluster tnd 

 crawl over the comb without injuring the delicate hexrg- 

 onal walls. These walls, as Professor Miller has kindly 

 ascertained for me, vary greatly in thickness; being, on 

 an average of twelve measurements made near the bor- 

 der of the comb, -^ of an inch in thickness; whereas 

 the basal rhomboidal plates are thicker, nearly in the 

 proportion of three to two, having a mean thickness, 

 from twenty-one measurements, of ^|^ of an inch. By 

 the above singular manner of building, strength is con- 

 tinually given to the comb, with the utmost ultimate 

 economy of wax. 



It seems at first to add to the difficulty of under- 

 standing how the cells are made, that a multitude of bees 

 all work together; one bee after working a short time at 

 one cell going to another, so that, as Huber has stated, 

 a score of individuals work even at the commencement 

 of the first cell. I was able practically to show this 

 fact, by covering the edges of the hexagonal walls of a 

 single cell, or the extreme margin of the circumferential 

 rim of a growing comb, with an extremely thin layer of 

 melted vermilion wax; and I invariably found that the 

 colour was most delicately diffused by the bees — as 

 delicately as a painter could have done it with his brush 

 — by atoms of the coloured wax having been taken from 

 the spot on which it had been placed, and worked into 

 the growing edges of the cells all round. The work of 

 construction seems to be a sort of balance struck between 

 many bees, all instinctively standing at the same relative 

 distance from each other, all trying to sweep equal 

 spheres, and then building up, or leaving ungnawed, 

 the planes of intersection between these spheres. It was 

 really curious to note in cases of difficulty, as when two 



