t commenced and
those completed, being thus crowned by a strong coping of wax, the
bees can cluster and crawl over the comb without injuring the delicate
hexagonal walls, which are only about one four-hundredth of an inch in
thickness; the plates of the pyramidal basis being about twice as thick.
By this singular manner of building, strength is continually given to
the comb, with the utmost ultimate economy of wax.

It seems at first to add to the difficulty of understanding 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 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 pieces of comb met at an angle,
how often the bees would entirely 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 gna