Chap. VII. 
CELLS OF THE HIVE-BEE. 
229 
ment, would have broken into each other from the 
opposite sides. The bees, however, did not suffer this 
to happen, and they stopped their excavations in due 
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 
