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 opposite 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 vermilion wax, as they
circularly gnawed away and deepened 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 concave
on one side, where I suppose that the bees had excavated 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 plate had been completed, and had
become PERFECTLY FLAT: it was absolutely impossible, from the extreme
thinness of the little rhombic plate, that they could have effected this
by gnawing away the convex side; and I suspect that the bees in such
cases stand in the opposed cells and push and bend the ductile and warm
wax (which as I have tried is easily done) into its proper intermediate
plane, and thus flatten it.

From the experiment of the ridge of vermilion wax, we can clearly see
that if the bees were to build for themselves a thin wall of wax, they
could make their cells of the proper shape, by standing at the proper