he basal rhomboidal plates are thicker, nearly in
the proportion of three to two, having a mean thickness, from twenty-one
measurements, of 1/229 of an inch. By the above 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 it 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 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 the adjoining cells has been built. This capacity in be