232 
INSTINCT. 
Chap. VII. 
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 circumfer¬ 
ential 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 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 difli- 
culty, as when two pieces of comb met at an angle, how 
often the bees would pull down and rebuild in different 
ways the same cell, sometimes recurring to a shape 
which they had at first rejected. 
When bees have a place on which they can stand in 
their proper positions for working,—for instance, on a 
slip of wood, placed directly under the middle of a comb 
growing downwards so that the comb has to be built over 
one face of the slip—in this case the bees can lay the 
foundations of one wall of a new hexagon, in its strictly 
proper place, projecting beyond the other completed 
cells. It suffices that the bees should be enabled to 
stand at their proper relative distances from each other 
and from the walls of the last completed cells, and then, 
by striking imaginary spheres, they can build up a wall 
intermediate between two adjoining spheres ; but, as far 
as I have seen, they never gnaw away and finish off the 
angles of a cell till a large part both of that cell and of 
