HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 275 
there is not time to construct fresh cells, the bees lengthen the honey cells 
by adding a rim to them. 
You will be anxious to learn the process which’ these ingenious artificers 
follow in constructing their habitations ; and on this head I am happy that 
the recent publication of a new edition of the celebrated Huber’s New Ob- 
servations on Bees, in which this subject is for the first time elucidated, will 
enable me to gratify your curiosity. 
But in the first place you must be told of an important and unlooked-for 
discovery of this unrivalled detector of the hidden mysteries of nature— 
that the workers or neuters, as they are called, of a hive consist of two 
descriptions of individuals, one of which he calls abeiles nourrices, or petites 
abeilles, the other abeilles ciriéres. The former, or nurse bees, are smaller than 
the latter’; their stomach is not capable of such distension ; and their office 
is to build the combs and cells after the foundation has been laid by the 
ciriéres, to collect honey, and to feed the larve. The abeilles ciriéres 
are the makers of wax, which substance Huber has now indisputably ascer- 
tained to be secreted, as John Hunter long ago suspected, beneath the ven- 
tral segments, from between which it is taken by the bees when wanted, in 
the form of thin scales. The apparatus in which the wax is secreted con- 
sists of four pair of membranous bags or waa-pockets, situated at the base 
of each intermediate segment, one on each side, which can only be seen by 
pressing the abdomen so as to lengthen it, being usually concealed by the 
overlapping of the preceding segments. It should be observed that this 
discovery was nearly made by our countryman Thorley, who, in his 
Hemale Monarchy (1744), says that he has taken bees with six pieces of 
wax within the plaits of the abdomen, three on each side. In these pockets 
the wax is secreted by some unknown process from the food taken into the 
stomach, which in the wax-making bees is much larger than in the nurse- 
sees, and afterwards transpires through the membrane of the wax-pocket 
:n thin laminee. The nurse-bees, however, do secrete wax, but in very 
small quantities. When wax is not wanted in the hive, the wax-makers 
disgorge their honey into the cells. 
The process of building the combs in a bee-hive, as observed by Huber, 
is as follows :— 
The wax-makers, having taken a due portion of honey or sugar, from 
cither of which wax can be elaborated, suspend themselves to each other, 
the claws of the forelegs of the lowermost being attached to those of the 
hind pair of the uppermost, and form themselves into a cluster, the exterior 
layer’ of which looks like a kind of curtain. This cluster consists of a 
series of festoons or garlands, which cross each other in all directions, and 
in which most of the bees turn their back upon the observer: the curtain 
has no other motion than what it receives from the interior layers, the fluc- 
tuations of which are communicated to it. All this time the nurse-bees 
Preserve their wonted activity and pursue their usual employments. The 
wax-makers remain immoveable for about twenty-four hours, during which 
period the formation of wax takes place, and thin lamine of this material 
may be generally perceived under their abdomen. One of these bees is 
how seen to detach itself from one of the central garlands of the cluster, 
to make a way amongst its companions to the middle of the vault 
°r top of the hive, and by turning itself round to form a kind of void, in 
which it can move itself freely, It then suspends itself to the centre of 
the space, which it has cleared, the diameter of which is about an inch, It 
T2 
