ARTIFICIAL AIDS TO COMB-BUILDING. 
215 
about ^ of the whole.* And thus the cell walls 
and midrib together make up eleven times the comb 
area very closely. If to this be added the sealing, 
we find that the industrious labourers have to 
produce a surface of wax tissue of upwards of 1300 
square inches to furnish a Standard frame, or about 
enough, in a hive of eleven frames, to ceil a room 
ten feet square. 
Thick foundation would, we have said, furnish suf- 
ficient material for the completion of the comb ; but 
the bees very rarely work more than half their cell 
walls out of even the stoutest sheets given them, 
leaving a thick mass of yellow wax in the neigh- 
bourhood of the angles of the rhombs. It has often 
been noticed that the amount of paring to which 
the foundation is subjected varies according to 
external conditions, and that, especially when busy 
honey-gathering, the bees scrape the foundation but 
little. The reason is not far to seek. The cell of 
worker-comb is not much larger than is absolutely 
necessary to admit the wax-builder’s body. The 
scraping and thinning of the cell base supply 
materials which must be stowed somewhere until it 
can be put into form, and the instinct of the 
modeller leads her to pack it along the rim of the 
gradually-growing cell walls ; but heavy additions 
cannot here be made, or the little worker would 
herself be prevented from getting at the seat of 
her operations. When the cell wall is half drawn 
out, the foundation is, of course, only partially 
* The total area of the rhombs is to the area of the comb as \/ 3 : \/ 2. 
